I have to admit that before we moved here, we had been warned about the weather. No — warned is not strong enough. It was kind of like that sign in The Wizard of Oz, the one that Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion reads out loud: “I’d turn back if I were you!” We were led to believe that 9 to 10 months of the year, this place is under water, or it’s like Ray Bradbury’s Venus, in a short story I remember reading as a kid. That’s the one where it rains for 10 years and then the sun comes out for only one afternoon (and a poor little girl is locked in a closet by her nasty classmates and misses the entire event).
When we visited in January, it did in fact drizzle for the entire time, but it was unusually rainy that month, even for here. On the other hand, after we moved here, we were lucky to have several weeks of absolutely spectacular weather: dry, warm, and sunny every day. We went for a walk nearly every evening, and the sun set around 9 PM.
Fast forward to this weekend: Despite what the forecast is, today was a beautiful afternoon. The sun was low in the sky, and the temperature was a little chilly, but not uncomfortable. We took another stroll along False Creek south, and Pam took some pictures with her new camera (I’ll try and post some of them on Flickr later). The widgets on my Mac desktop (click the thumbnail to see a full-size version) bear this out. The web cams show what it looked like on the Burrard Bridge and Jericho Beach. The widget to the left has the temperature (Celsius) and the forecast:
I know that there will be some rough weeks ahead when the sun shines very little, but that’s what books, movies, TV, the library, cafés (like the Wicked Café nearby), concerts, friends over for games, simulated sunlight lamps and roasted chicken/beef/pork/vegetables are for. For today, at least, the deluge is just on the horizon, however bad it gets.
