Everyone complains about the weather....

One of the defining characteristics of being Canadian, they say, is that we like to complain about the weather. Well there’s certainly good cause to do so this summer (?), especially in Eastern Ontario.

The only thing that got us sanely through a miserable winter with near-record snowfalls was the weather forecasters promising us a “long, hot summer”, starting in April. Well, to be fair, we did have a week of summer-like weather in April, but since then it’s been in the crapper. May was just miserable and cold. June, with 22 days of rain, has been dubbed Junuary by some. July, which is when we expect to be basking under hot, sunny skies, has been mostly below normal highs, grey, and with at least a 40% chance of precipitation virtually every day. And there’s no end in sight as rain and cool temperatures are forecast to the end of the month.

Enough is enough! Golfers are wearing out their umbrellas from the constant opening and closing as shower after shower passes through. Motorcyclists have stripped every last piece of raingear off the shelves at the local dealers. Vegetable gardens, if they are growing at all, are weeks behind where they should be. Mosquitoes, deer flys and other damp-loving insects are out (and biting) in record numbers. My furnace actually started up one morning. In July! @#%&#@

Now the weather guys are insisting that, in fact, they were right all along and that the summer so far has been warmer than usual. The justification for that stunning assessment is that it isn’t getting as cold at night because of all the cloud cover, so the average temperatures were slightly up over previous years.

Well, I don’t know about you, but when someone tells me it’s going to be warmer than usual, I don’t expect to have to enjoy that excess heat swatting mosquitoes in the dark!