Wednesday, September 12, 2007

My year without a summer


The year 1816 brought a weather phenomena that set forth a chain reaction of events. The "Year Without a Summer" was also dubbed by historians and scientists as "Eighteen hundred and froze to death," where poverty hit the Northern United States and New England, Canada, and Northern Europe. The snow-filled summer of that year resulted to heavily-damaged crops, destroyed agricultural livelihood, and a mass exodus of people from the affected regions to complete the westbound move to where they had hoped to be areas of kinder climactic conditions.

It has been over a year since I also had completed my west-ward Boston-San Francisco move.

The year 2007 marks my year without a summer. Between June through the Labor Day weekend, there were no trips made to the beach, no tan, no sand on my toes, not a whole lot of patio bar happy hour sessions. The weekends were not my own, as most of them were spend under this fog cloud. Yes, apparently we were blessed this year (more than the last) with a few days of summer-like weather; and then there were those mornings where I went to work wearing a fleece jacket.

Fault is mine: Could've-would've-should've made time to cross the bridge a few miles out of San Francisco to remember how a California summer is supposed to be like. But I was at the mercy of, well - other seemingly bigger things. No summer tan, no foliage. September and October should be better for this area, warmth-wise... so in retrospect I suppose it was not so bad.

Who am I kidding? I look at that snowboard propped on the wall and think: Let the (snow) season start already.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

you know it was a volcano in Indonesia that caused that...I hope at least you have a man or device in your life that caused you to have some of your own personal eruptions this year :-))

CMad said...

Yes, I know it was a volcano. Thanks for the, uh - well wishes, but my year without a summer was specifically speaking to my lack of beach time...