Icepocalypse 2010 - Our weather curse continues

I know I don't have any direct effect on the weather. But you know how people often say, "Did you bring that rain (or snow or sun) with you?"

I will say that the last few moves we've made happened to coincide with very strange weather patterns, and I'll give my conservative friends a break and not mention that-which-must-not-be-mentioned, but I'll give you a hint, it starts with a global and ends with warming.

For the sake of peace and harmony and glorious ignorance, let's just say that weather and rare-occurring phenomena seem to follow us from place to place.

I can't really explain it other than to say we're blessed?

We moved to Missoula in the summer of 2007. I moved over a few weeks before Cheryl and the kids joined me. All was fairly normal, or so it seemed. I ran into typical Montana summer weather in some big thunder boomers crossing over McDonald Pass to Helena. And back in Missoula I found the late-afternoon rain showers refreshing.

But then the mercury began to rise. By the time Cheryl and the kids showed up on the scene, the temperature hit 105, and it didn't back down for 10 days. It was, in fact, the longest stretch of hot weather to hit the western part of the state in recorded history. If I'm not mistaken, I believe Montana reached its all-time high temperature that summer.

Needless to say, we sweltered in our welcome week in Montana.

There were other strange things before that. I once flew into Nadi Airport in Fiji a day before a powerful Typhoon brushed the northern part of the islands and devastated a few villages that we helped clean up after.

We ran into record-breaking rainfall in a move to Hawaii many years ago and watched streams rise over their banks and flood parts of town at the same time that the Pacific Northwest was inundated by what meteorologists started to call the Pineapple Express at the time.

Of course moving to Anchorage I assumed we might see some sort of blizzard for the ages, but no, our weather streak continues as the state is gripped in what people on Twitter are calling the icepocalypse, what in some places has been called an unprecedented weather event.

We've been here a little under a month now, and it snowed once in any concentration. I think it was about 7 inches, about half of which remains dank and dirty encased in layers of frozen rain.

I believe there is a collective cry for snow reverberating around the state, as outdoor enthusiasts and commuters alike, dislike the current state of the weather in the state.

I know it's not us, it's the unpredictable nature of weather and the effects of the thing-which-must-not-be-mentioned, but which clearly has an impact on our weather, whether or not we (humans) contribute to it or not.

Weather, like sports and Sarah Palin, gives us something to talk about around the Thanksgiving table. And on a day like today, with the sky dripping down over Anchorage, freezing in spots or splashing into slushy puddles, I'm grateful for neighbors who keep their apartments so hot that I don't have to and hooded parkas and working indoors. And for probably the first time in my life, I'm actually praying for snow.