Thursday Thermals - April 11, 2013

I promised an update today on my serious 'bum in chair' writing and here it is: some 3000 more words have  made it onto paper since Monday afternoon, for a total of 17,517 since January 20th (see Monday Moanings - April 8). Woo hoo! This is especially gratifying as for some reason I chose to focus on my mother's last months on this earth for this part of the memoir, and the weather here in my part of the world has been nothing short of miserable - enough to suck back the ink in any pen.

Spring has been pretty much a non-starter this year, reluctant would be a generous description. My current 'forecast' is that this season of promise will amount to the two or three days between the furnace going off and the air conditioner coming on. You heard it here first!

I confess to being somewhat of a weather geek. First thing every morning after a passing glance at the outdoor thermometer, I fling open the drapes and scan the sky, then it's over to my PC for a check of the weather radar and forecasts (multiple sources). I love a good thunderstorm and marvel at its development in the clouds. It's in my genes.

My Dad, Bev Cudbird, was a weatherman, a meteorologist with Environment Canada until retirement and then the staff meteorologist for radio station CFRB from the late seventies to the early 1980's. I like to think he pioneered that media role. Of course radio has some definite advantages over TV; presenters don't have to worry about what they're wearing, and as in my Dad's case, one doesn't even have to be in the studio. Most of Dad's broadcasts came from the upstairs den in my parents' condo in Etobicoke. If you listened carefully to some of those broadcasts you could hear the chattering of the two teletype machines that spewed out the latest observations and forecasts on reams of newsprint paper.

For Dad there was no room for moaning and groaning about the weather, though there was plenty of room  to chastise forecasters for spending so much time peering at radar and studying forecast models, that they forgot to look out the window. I can see him now, tearing off a sheet from the teletype, looking at the latest official forecast, ripping it in two and yelling, "Look out the goddam window!"

He would take a day like today with its snow, cold and ice pellets and tell us how good this is for soil moisture and lake levels, how good this is for food crops - bright green peas, long orange carrots and later in the season, bright red tomatoes, warm from the garden. So that's how I'm going to look at today - a luscious tomato in the making!

Thanks Dad!