Ode to Sunny Weather, or a Response to Lawyerish Part II

The Man (I have no good nickname for him yet) and I started thinking about a move to Los Angeles when things just didn't seem to be improving for us in Seattle. We weren't that happy with our jobs (I had spent three years looking for a different one without any luck), the weather was making me depressed, I was tired of being cold, and things just weren’t progressing. Seattle was in an economic slump after the burst of the dot com bubble and Boeing was shedding employees by the hundreds, creating a pretty sad job market and mood for the city. I just didn’t know how to make things better, so we started talking about moving to a warmer climate.

Both of us wanted more creativity in our lives and the film industry seemed like an option. We took a visit to LA, liked it, and then thought about the move for two years (I don’t make any major decisions without much, much research and contemplation). And then it was just time. Kind of like when you’re in your senior year of college and no matter how much you loved school and being around all your friends, come spring you suddenly start to just feel over it all. You become ready to move on. It was that time for Seattle. And I couldn’t have been happier with the choice that Labor Day weekend in 2002 as we were packing and the heavens opened, spilling rain upon the city, beginning the next nine months of wet.

There was nothing worse for me than those first fall rains, the knowledge that the happiness of summer and sun was over for longer than I felt I could stand. The especially cruel part about it is that there is no place better to be in the summer than the Pacific Northwest. That area of the country is stunningly beautiful. The weather can be hot, but there’s little humidity, few bugs, and the nights are very long. People in the PNW are actually giddy during the summer, drunk on sunshine. And then it’s over and the rain comes back and you have to steel yourself for another nine months. Growing up, we never felt in the clear until after the 4th of July. That’s just not right.

And so we left for LA and though I know I have lots of good and bad to say about the city, I’ll just focus on the weather, since that was the original reason for this post. I love the sunshine. I never get tired of it. It makes me happy every day. I’m always grateful to see a blue sky. I never feel guilty for going to a movie in the middle of a sunny Saturday afternoon like I would have in Seattle because it’s sunny almost every Saturday afternoon. I look at weather reports for different parts of the country during the winter and I feel like I live on a different planet. I love walking outside and not tensing up, getting in my car every morning without having to scrape windows or shovel snow, not feeling the rage I used to feel when I felt cold and wet, feeling motivated to exercise, eating lunch outside almost year round, seeing flowers all year long, not to mention trees that keep their leaves--I could go on and on. But let me dispel a myth instead: Los Angeles has seasons.

Okay, so it doesn’t usually snow in the city (though it did once this winter, very briefly), but there ARE seasons. It gets so cold in the winter that I often have to wear a winter coat and we use our gas heat for months. Just because it’s sunny doesn’t mean it’s warm all the time. This means winter clothes and down comforters! My wardrobe can appropriately change with the seasons! It also can get rainy in the winter, though for shorter periods of time and without a constant cloud cover. Only 2 1/2 hours away are mountains you can go skiing in. LA is one of the only places I know where you could surf in the morning and ski in the afternoon. The foliage is another clue to the seasons. I love the spring when the Jacaranda trees show off their bright purple blossoms. So yes, Los Angeles has seasons, they just happen to be milder, and that is fine by me. I never get tired of sunshine and I appreciate the energy it gives me to get through my life. That it’s guilt-free is just a bonus.

Ode to Sunny Weather, or a Response to Lawyerish Part 1

I grew up in Oregon, land of rain and gloom. The weather didn't bother me that much when I was younger. I think it was because I didn't know there was an alternative (this line of thinking, by the way, is how I rationalize why people live in the Mid-West: they don't know there are other options). When I decided to go to the East Coast for college (more on how I decided to do that in a future post) I knew that I was in for weather like I'd never had to experience before, and I was right. It got cold and snowy that first winter. There was an actual blizzard! What a shock it was to run out of the dorm with wet hair one morning on my way to class and have it freeze before I got there into little dread-like icicles. THAT was a new experience, one that I avoided having twice. But I loved the snow and the seasons, especially the fall. Fall in New England is magical. One of my favorite memories was stretching on the rugby field after practice (yes I played rugby and I LOVED it), looking out at the forest of colored leaves in their reds, oranges, and yellows, and hearing a rogue bagpiper walking around the nearby lake. It was beautiful. Fall in New England also conjures up memories of apple cider, fresh donuts, and an actual hayride. The weather brought an emotion to the place that felt so fresh and real and alive, while also somehow connecting you to all the history the place possesses. I loved it.

But after graduating I felt the urge to move back to the Pacific Northwest--the place that felt like me, the place where everything was familiar and normal. I missed real mountains, being close to the ocean, the people, the attitude, the history, the food--all the things that made me feel like an insider, rather than an outsider. The fact that I can feel like an outsider in my own country is one of the things I like about the US. I love that it can feel and be so different in so many places. Anyway, I moved to Seattle.

One of the things that I had not missed and slowly grew to loathe was the weather. There's a line in Sleepless in Seattle when someone is protesting the thought of Tom Hanks's character moving to Seattle. They say, "It rains nine months out of the year in Seattle!" It's something a lot of people think was exaggerated, I actually got asked a lot whether the rain was a sort of urban legend, as if it really couldn't be as bad as everyone made it out to be. Well, it's that bad and sometimes worse. There are a lot of people who love it and live no differently because of the rain. I was always baffled by the runners and bikers--they were out there no matter what, as if they didn't even notice it raining. I was never that way. The rain made me want to curl up in a ball on my couch under a blanket. I never wanted to leave my house. Driving terrified me, I was always afraid of hydroplaning into the big rigs on the freeways. I had rain rage. And it made me depressed. I lost all motivation for anything in my life because going out required me to toss off the blanket and go outside into the wet. I needed that blanket, it kept me warm. Oh how I was cold. That was maybe the worst part. There is something about a wet cold that chills you to the bone. It's really hard to get warm. Things were in a sad state for me. So my boyfriend and I discussed options and decided to move to Los Angeles (again, that's a whole other post of its own). Los Angeles is the land of sunshine and it makes me so happy. So, so happy. More on why it makes me happy to come...