Meterologically speaking...

I studied in London during my senior year at BYU. Before I left, I heard a lot about how dreary and murky the skies in London would be. One of my fondest memories of the semester is from an afternoon when we saw a matinee (Two Gentlemen of Verona, if I remember correctly) at the Globe Theatre. After it ended, our group walked up a flight of stairs, taking us from river-level to a bridge crossing the Thames. When we got up to the bridge, the whole sky was awash in peaches and pinks and purples. Our program director, David Taylor, was a design professor, and I remember him musing over whether it was a baroque sky or a rococo sky. I felt that all it was missing was a woman on a swing (a la Fragonard) or a bunch of cherubs. Regardless, it felt like a perfect sky and a perfect day.

Since that time, the perfect sky hasn't often coincided with the perfect day. When we lived in Minnesota, it was usually cloudy or snowy in the winters. There were times when a whole month would pass and we'd never see the sun. At the time, our family/play room was in the basement, and I often felt like winters were just four or five months of gray. But sometimes, I'd wake up in the morning and be surprised to find that the sun had won the battle of the clouds, at least for a few hours. It was those sunny winter days, more than even the months of perfect Minnesota summer days, that I think of when I think back on our time in Rochester. There was usually snow on the ground, and the combination of the white, white snow and the bright sun made the whole world look like it was encrusted in diamonds. Of course, if you tried to actually go outside and enjoy the sunshine during the Minnesota winter, you'd soon learn the error of your ways. Any true Minnesotan knows that the only time the sun shines in the winter, the thermometer is guaranteed to register below zero. Above zero and it's always cloudy.

One of the things I love best about living in Texas is the clouds in the summer. The first week we lived here, I couldn't stop looking at them. They're impossibly puffy and white, and since it's so flat here the sky is huge, so the clouds seem to go on forever. For most of the year, we just have regular clouds, but a few weeks ago, I noticed that the summer clouds were back. Now, when I'm driving the kids to camp or making a run to the grocery store, the clouds keep me company. But I've noticed that the days that the clouds are the puffiest, the whitest, the most beautiful are also the days that it's the hottest, the stickiest and the most insufferable.

There are a lot of things I love about living in Texas-- the clouds are one of them. But the thing I love most? Air conditioning.