Since when did the weather become headline news?  Seems like the lead story on the nightly news half the time now is the rain, or the lack of rain, or the snow or the heat.  Really?  Is that the most important thing that happened in the world today?

OK, I admit, I am a little obsessed with the weather, especially now that I am not working and I don’t have work crises to occupy my brain.  Plus, I had the good/bad fortune of growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area which basically has a perfect climate year round, so now anything other than perfect weather startles me.  I do have two separate weather apps on my phone where I check weather in multiple locations, first thing, each day (New York, Park City, Santa Barbara, Carmel, Los Altos, Frankfurt, Spokane, Colorado Springs, Baily Island, San Francisco, Omaha, Geneva and Saigon).  Maybe more than a little obsessive.

But I am weird.  What about the rest of the world?  Don’t they have anything better going on?  Or are we, as the Governor of Pennsylvania said, a nation of wimps?  It snows in the winter.  It snows in New York.  It always has.  Remember George Washington crossing the Delaware?  It was snowing.  And his soldiers didn’t even have Uggs.  It is hot in the summer.  All over. They write songs about it.  No news there.

Yesterday, on one of my weather apps, there was a severe weather alert for Santa Barbara that cited dangerous mountain winds that could affect driving, specifically on Highway 154, which I can see from my house.  It was a little breezy.  That’s it.  You could have maybe flown a kite.  I did not see any cars being blown off the road.  That was a severe weather alert? And in the days before Thanksgiving, the news guys in Salt Lake were talking nonstop about the blizzard of the century that was coming to Park City.  I was getting pretty nervous, because it snows like crazy in Park City eight months out of the year, so the blizzard of the century must be really bad.  Turns out, it snowed.  It snowed about 6 inches, and it was windy, but my husband drove over the pass to Salt Lake airport at 9 pm, during the peak of it, and brought his son back home without mishap at all.

I know all about the global warming thing.  The earth is getting warmer, and it may be causing more extreme weather.  Or maybe the networks are getting hungrier, and since everyone can relate to the weather, hyping approaching weather and making it seem like a big deal, gets viewers, especially weather obsessed people like me.  Or maybe we have so darn many stations on 24/7, and constant access to online news, that we have stooped to making weather seem like a huge, looming threat just to take up air time.

When they were little, my brothers made up their own newspaper called The Boyle Bugle.  Next to the mast head, they included the weather report for Mexico: Chilly today, hot tamale.  And when you think about it, short of any real life threatening weather situations,  that’s all we really need to know about the weather.