Oh global, where is thy warming?

Well, it’s official, this could be the coldest summer since people have been keeping track of that sort of thing. (Gloomy summer) We have had exactly zero days where the temperature rose above 75 F. We have had two, count them, two, that it rose above 70. And, oh boy, seven precious days where it got over 65. No wonder I have had the urge to split wood. If the national pastime is baseball, the Alaska pastime is complaining about weather. We complain about cold summer and rain. But the last couple of years have been warm, the woods tinder dry and wildfires burned more than 5 million acres, and we complained about that. In winter we complain about too much snow, or, not enough snow. We complain about cold but then we complain when it warms up and everything turns to slush. Where I used to live the average snowfall was about 250 inches, but one winter we got 547, that’s 45 and a half feet. I have seen 51 inches fall in 36 hours. I remember telling a friend on the phone about that and she said "Oh what fun!" I had snow up to my eyeballs and couldn't find my car. "NO! It's NOT fun!" Where I am now there is very little snow and what there is often blows away in the incessant wind and the snowmachine sits in the yard, useless. And on and on and on. You have to love it. The fact is Alaskans take a perverse pleasure in the exotic weather. It is like, we can take it and you can't, but we reserve the right to complain anyway. The picture I took when I arrived home today is the mountain I see out my front window and that is new snow on it this morning.