I am obsessed with the weather. My iPhone has only enabled it. I seriously check the weather a dozen times a day. Or more. This has to do with another obsessive need, my need to be prepared, to plan. I want to be better than a Boy Scout. I hate, hate, hate being caught wearing the wrong thing, whether I am too hot or too cold or my shoe is giving me a blister, or I am wearing a cardigan when everyone else has on a suit jacket. I revel smugly in being perfectly dressed, perfectly prepared and perfectly comfortable for the weather. Or anything else that comes along.
The temperature of the house also has to be juuuust porridge-right. During the maddening spring time, I dash about the house opening and shutting windows, turning fans on and off, turning the A/C and the heat on and off, the thermostat up and down, as the temperature insists on being so fickle, vacillating from 45 to 82 and back. I hate being hot inside the house, HATE, especially at night, when I firmly believe the only way for civilized people to sleep is in a cold room under a fluffy down comforter.
And now, of course, there is The Girl. The Olive. The amount of time that I spend worrying about whether she is too hot or too cold is absurd. I strive to also dress her perfectly for the weather each day. She has lately been thwarting me in this effort, as I put a zippered sweatshirt on her to ward off the chill in the cool hours of the morning only to have her refuse to take it off for the rest of the day, even when it gets to 75 in the sun. I fruitlessly try to convince her that she is hot, that it is time to take off the sweatshirt, which is met with flailing and an eardrum-piercing shriek.
I also have to Plan, with a capital P. Can I run outside today? Will it be better in the morning or at lunchtime? If it's a non-running day, would it be better to go for a walk at lunch or run some errands in the car? Will it be nice enough to go outside with the Olive after I get home? Warm enough for the water table? Worth filling up the wading pool? Or will we have to amuse ourselves with streaming Netflix as the rain streams down our windowpanes? What will we do this weekend? Can we go outside, to a garden or park. or will it be a museum day?
Weather.com does not help. They have hour by hour, day by day, month by month weather! For anywhere! If I check in an hour, it might be different! Maybe it won't rain on Saturday, if I just look again.... And I can look at the July averages for West Tisbury, MA to plan for a bucolic week on the Vineyard, away from the stifling swamp of DC.
Oh Information Age, oh Internet, you are enabling, and I love you so for it. Now, it's going to be approximately 64 and sunny when I get home, so yoga pants and a long-sleeved t-shirt and a fleece vest should be perfect for playing in the backyard, and we should be able to have the windows open a little tonight, it should be nice and cool......
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