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Do you know why the Brits talk about the weather so much?

clouds

Because their weather is fucking psychotic, that’s why.

I was minding my own business, weeding the driveway (my driveway is BRICK! Hahaha! But it hasn’t been weeded in a thousand years). It was sunny, warm, if a bit windy.

And then this spooky bastard blew up, pelted me with hail for five minutes, and flew off again.

I was like, “WTF?! Did anybody get the number on that bus?”

Then it was sunny again. Stupid England.

Happy Friday, everyone! (Yeah, funny that. Even when you’re unemployed, it matters).

Comments


Comment from Dave in Texas
Time: March 27, 2009, 8:54 pm

Feh. You just described “Tuesday” in Texas.

*waves howdy while waiting for sleet. Yes. Sleet.


Comment from Mrs. Peel
Time: March 27, 2009, 9:29 pm

Today (in Texas, I might add), I was putting the finishing touches on a document, when a huge rainstorm blew in and pummeled the windows. I sighed in annoyance, because if I had finished the document 10 minutes earlier, I’d have been in my car and on the road, and wouldn’t be about to get wet.

By the time I finished emailing my friend (another 5-10 minutes max) and got outside, there was a rainbow.

No pot of gold, though.


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: March 27, 2009, 9:49 pm

Bloody Texans. Feh. My mama was a Texan. You guys never shutthefuckup about Texas, do you?

We went there one Summer. I didn’t get it.


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: March 27, 2009, 10:10 pm

Um. Sorry. Did I say that out loud?


Comment from Uncle Badger
Time: March 27, 2009, 10:11 pm

Would I be intruding on a domestic dispute if I suggested that ZZ Top were OK?


Comment from Roman Wolf
Time: March 27, 2009, 10:13 pm

Heya Weasel, this is my first time writing here. Great little blog ya have here. Reminds me of past days in my homeland(well, one of my two homelands, I still live in my other one).

Anyways, here in colorful Colorado, we were minding our own business with some nice spring weather, then on Thursday we get a massive blizzard(which might I add ruins my whole day). To top it off, I had to walk in it.

So yeah, Mother Nature, such a kind mum ya know.


Comment from Jill
Time: March 27, 2009, 10:16 pm

My cousin moved to Austin from Pittsburgh.

Her new Mini-Cooper got the living shit beat out of it by baseballs masquerading as hail on Wednesday.

The windshield is smashed in and the surface resembles a golf ball. Teh awesome! That kind of crap never happens here.


Comment from Uncle Badger
Time: March 27, 2009, 10:20 pm

Doesn’t happen here either, Jill!

Respect! (But just keep that kind of stuff to yourselves, OK?)


Comment from Mrs. Hill
Time: March 27, 2009, 10:28 pm

Hmmmm — has anyone checked Al Gore’s itinerary lately?


Comment from armybrat
Time: March 27, 2009, 10:49 pm

20+ years ago, I was working in my yard in KS on a bright sunny day. Clouds scuttled in and then took over the sky. Then the wind started. By the time it was all over, I lost my house to a tornado. So….if you’re outside of tornado alley…..clouds don’t scare me.
BTW….a large section of KS, the panhandle of OK and TX and a solid portion of northwestern TX are shut down by a spring blizzard. That’s a gigantic section of the US affected by gorbal warming. fuck al gore.


Comment from Glenster
Time: March 27, 2009, 10:50 pm

Man, there sure a lot of us Texans here, I’ll tell you what. I’m not a *native* Texan, though- I’m originally a Baltimoron…


Comment from DaveDave
Time: March 27, 2009, 11:01 pm

Yep, lots of us Texans here. Former UK resident too. Peek in on you and Rachel Rupert-not-his-real-name nearly every day. I miss horizontal rain and the slates rattling on the roof (it was Scotland).


Comment from MCPO Airdale
Time: March 27, 2009, 11:05 pm

Just you wait until those hot, humid days in August when the mercury reaches 76F!!!!


Comment from scubafreak
Time: March 28, 2009, 12:58 am

Thats OK, Stoatie. We’re digging out from under yesterdays blizzard. 18 inches, and the major roads have already melted clean……

Thats Colorado for ya…..


Comment from scubafreak
Time: March 28, 2009, 1:06 am

Mrs Hill: I think he’s booked up this week trying to track down ManBearPig…..


Comment from Phineas
Time: March 28, 2009, 2:05 am

hmm… SoCal weather still too cold for street asphalt foot burns.

But by the end of summer we can walk on flaming coals not just hot ones.


Comment from Mrs. Peel
Time: March 28, 2009, 7:05 am

hot, humid days in August when the mercury reaches 76F!

*mind boggles*

Anyway, Weas, we were just commiserating on the changeability of weather. I remember one time in college, I went into class under a clear, shining sky. I walked out of the building 50 minutes later into a driving rainstorm. I had an umbrella, of course (I ALWAYS have an umbrella. In fact, I keep an “emergency umbrella” in my car in case something happens to the regular one), but the rain was coming down at 45º, so I still got soaked from the waist down. Like, all the way through to my undies. Fortunately, that was my last class of the day, so I was able to change into dry clothes.


Comment from Rachel Lucas
Time: March 28, 2009, 7:39 am

As someone who spent most of her life in Texas and now lives in England like The Stoat, I feel I am qualified to say that England is TEN TIMES WORSE with this fuckin’ psychotic weather-changing shit, especially if you narrow it down to actual Conditions rather than Temperature.

Stone truth. In Texas, yes, it would sometimes change from day to day, and occasionally during the day with a storm or a front. Here, conditions (though not so much temps) change a few dozen times every single day, at least in the 6 weeks I’ve been here.

Pretty much every half-hour it goes from bright/sunny to rain. It freaks me OUT, I tell you. Hold me.


Comment from Uncle Badger
Time: March 28, 2009, 8:34 am

Yes, Rachel has nailed it. We can run through just about the entire sequence in a day, here.

I used to know an Australian who told me (quite straight-faced) that he lived in the UK because of the weather. For him, waking up every morning to blue skies and hot sun was too boring.

We sort of lost touch after they locked him away.


Comment from dfbaskwill
Time: March 28, 2009, 8:49 am

Just like Florida weather without the Florida!


Comment from Mrs. Hill
Time: March 28, 2009, 12:24 pm

Stoaty and Uncle B,

You live practically on the Channel, right? Can I be lazy and ask if the weather in Northumberland or Yorkshire is any less fickle?


Comment from Janna
Time: March 28, 2009, 1:04 pm

I live in Oklahoma. I just planted 3 flats of flowers…AND mowed the lawn..Now we have hail, and snow with actual BLIZZARD conditions in the panhandle. Crap.
Only in Oklahoma do you have to mow the yard BEFORE IT SNOWS.

Shit.
Now I have to buy flowers again.
I think the nurserys do it on purpose…twice the sales, you know.


Comment from Gibby Haynes
Time: March 28, 2009, 1:50 pm

No Mrs. Hill, it’s fickle everywhere. I live in Yorkshire and it’s been raining, then being gusty, then being sunny, and back to raining all in the space of about 5 minutes all day today.

Why do you think we drink so much?


Comment from Mrs. Hill
Time: March 28, 2009, 3:35 pm

Yikes — thanks, Gibby!

Can I pick your brains one more time? Is this fickleness seasonal at all? I’m wondering if there’s an equinoctial component, or is it just perennially nuts?

(My only sampling of data was a few days in November, nearly twenty years ago — pretty much a steady, grey drizzle the whole time — but maybe that was a fluke all its own!)


Comment from JuliaM
Time: March 28, 2009, 4:54 pm

“No Mrs. Hill, it’s fickle everywhere. I live in Yorkshire and it’s been raining, then being gusty, then being sunny, and back to raining all in the space of about 5 minutes all day today.”

Same here. At least it helped to dampen the spirits of the G20 protesters marching on Parliament this afternoon… 😉


Comment from Mrs. Hill
Time: March 28, 2009, 5:42 pm

“it helped to dampen the spirits of the G20 protesters”

So much for their inflammatory rhetoric, then — heehee.


Comment from Uncle Badger
Time: March 28, 2009, 5:48 pm

Spring is the most fickle time, Mrs Hill, though the weather in Britain is rarely very stable. Your few days of drizzle wasn’t unusual, but, then again, a week of sun isn’t unheard of, either.


Comment from MCPO Airdale
Time: March 28, 2009, 6:50 pm

I used to fly, weekly, to Prestwick, Wick (Scotland), Brawdy (Wales), Northholt (near London) and back to our base in East Anglia.

We used to take clothes for 4 seasons. . .


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: March 29, 2009, 5:30 am

And the weather reports are no help, either. You have to keep refreshing the Met Office page, and it changes frequently.

Honestly, if you look out the window to predict the weather, it isn’t a forecast, it’s an observation.


Comment from Gibby Haynes
Time: March 29, 2009, 8:11 am

It seems to be perenially nuts Mrs. Hill. I suspect many a good man has gone mad trying to make sense of Blighty’s weather. For instance now it’s beautiful. Brisk, but bright and sunny with not a cloud in the sky. In an hour it’ll probably be snowing or something.

Those G20 protesters deserve everything they get. I remember a few years ago when there was a meeting in Scotland and the protesters tried to gatecrash it by going across this guy’s farm. He and his cows didn’t share their myopic beliefs; he greeted them with a blunt instrument and his cows chased them across a field. It was hilarious.


Comment from Gnus
Time: March 29, 2009, 10:16 am

Since I’ve been in Florida, it’s not unusual to start in full sunshine, encounter one hell of a rain storm, and emerge into full sun again, all in the space of a 15 mile trip. I suppose it doesn’t help being near the beach.


Comment from Mrs. Hill
Time: March 29, 2009, 1:26 pm

“And the weather reports are no help, either. You have to keep refreshing the Met Office page, and it changes frequently.”

I have noticed that your Met office have a tendency to, er, overreach? They’ve been skewered over at “Watts Up” — http ://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/02/01/met-office-report-card-at-the-23-mark/

Sounds like they may deserve a bit more sympathy!


Comment from Jill
Time: March 29, 2009, 6:42 pm

Gnus, when I lived in Flahhhrida in the early 90’s, I vividly remember driving up I-75 to Ocala, and it raining like hay-yewl on the southbound side, yet it was dry as a bone on my side, the northbound lanes.


Comment from Nicholas the Slide
Time: March 30, 2009, 1:28 pm

I used to know an Australian who told me (quite straight-faced) that he lived in the UK because of the weather. For him, waking up every morning to blue skies and hot sun was too boring.

We sort of lost touch after they locked him away.

Sounds like my kind of guy 8) For some reason I’ve always been fond of erratic weather. All you people saying that the constant shifting drives you bonkers would probably lock me away too, if you saw the way I generally react to a sudden weather change. Then again, “sudden weather changes” don’t EXIST where I am now.

Add this Slide to the Texan list. I most certainly didn’t move to Arizona for the weather… though I much prefer the heat to the cold. I’d greatly rather roast than freeze. And roast I will, spring is officially here, which means we’ve got about two to four weeks until the first triple-digit day.


Comment from jwpaine
Time: March 30, 2009, 6:34 pm

The Weez seems to attract Coloradoans, too, looks like. Been a mild winter here in central Colorado this year, at least until we got the overload from Denver’s blizzard order dumped on us. I’ve only had to suit up and shove snow around with a tractor three times this winter, and once was to free a Texan who’d lodged his brand-new pickup in the piss-ditch about a mile from my ranch.

We hate Texans here in Colorado, by the way. Just so’s you know.


Comment from Machinist
Time: March 30, 2009, 7:30 pm

No problem,it must be tough living in the shadow of Texas.

http://s118.photobucket.com/albums/o109/machinist360/Texas/?action=view&current=texanmap.png


Comment from jwpaine
Time: March 30, 2009, 8:13 pm

That map always tickled me, and it’s been decades since I’ve seen it. Any chance there’s a larger (er, Texas-sized) version of it somewhere, so’s I can read the names of those outlying parcels?


Comment from Machinist
Time: March 30, 2009, 9:00 pm

Here is a slightly larger pic. If you download it you can use Windows picture viewer to expand it to make it easier to read.

http://s118.photobucket.com/albums/o109/machinist360/Texas/?action=view&current=texanmap-1.png


Comment from jwpaine
Time: March 30, 2009, 9:21 pm

“Uninhabitable.” Man, ain’t that the truth.


Comment from Nicholas the Slide
Time: March 31, 2009, 1:48 pm

“Damned Yankee Land” 😆 Awesome.


Comment from ATNorth
Time: April 4, 2009, 10:49 pm

calling the weather psychotic… coming from someone who lived in Massachusetts… damn.

Of course, as a Masshole who used to live in England, you’re completely correct.

Best Regards

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