Gotcha!

Well, I guess the Easter bunny saw his shadow too. You thought you could retrieve all your tools from the shed and start some yard work because it’s April, and suddenly Mother Nature decides she’s not done with winter yet. I have some flowers in my front yard that definitely wish she would make up her mind. It’s life or death for them, not just some April Fool’s joke. If Mother Nature is reading this, might I remind you that April Fool’s is only the first day of April, not the whole month. I believe we’ve received more snow in the first few weeks of spring than we did all winter. If you’ve been praying for moisture, make sure the next time you do, you specify what kind of moisture. Some April showers would be nice. April hail and sleet storms are not so nice.
If you think the weather is acting quite immaturely this year, I will proceed to provide a few reminders that it could always be worse. Mother Nature has a few good pranks up her sleeve, one of which is the ice storm. First, she takes a bunch of rain and dumps it on a large metropolitan area, and then she employs a heavy-duty, cold-air blow dryer, and freezes the water as it’s dripping down buildings and vegetation. The whole town looks like Midway’s Zermatt Resort in the winter with its crazy ice formations. It’s quite funny when people go to open their front door and it’s frozen solid. It’s even funnier when they finally get their front door open only to approach their completely iced-over vehicle. Forget the ice-scraper; they either need a jackhammer or a whole lotta patience as they wait for the sun to melt the ice. It has to be nice to make that call: “Hey, Jim, I can’t come to work today.” “Why not, Hank?” “I’m iced in.” “Good one, Hank. Ha ha. I expect to see you in the next half-hour. Hang on a minute, Hank. My front door won’t open. Hey, Mary, the front door is stuck. Hank, I’ll see you in a few…”
If an ice storm seems like an immature joke to you, how about non-aqueous rain? There is such a phenomenon as non-aqueous rain. “Rain that isn’t water? Impossible,” you say. Tell that to Hondurans between the months of May and July, when fish actually rain down upon the city of Yoro. Somehow, due to strong winds, the fish are literally swept away into a cloud and rained down over dry land hundreds of miles from where they were sucked up. Other crazy non-aqueous rains have included coal and frogs. When I first heard of such nonsense, I immediately thought about the phrase “it’s raining cats and dogs,” and I secretly hoped that somewhere in the world there is a place where little cats and dogs do come out of the sky like the fish in Yoro. Unfortunately I have not been able to find one account of such an event during my extensive research on the Interweb (I spent about 30 seconds looking; if Google can’t pull up any results, it doesn’t exist, right?).
There are numerous other weather phenomena that I could talk about, but they’re just not as funny as ice storms and animal rain. In fact Mother Nature can be downright nasty sometimes. I’m glad that we’re receiving more snow rather than earthquakes and tsunamis. I just wish I hadn’t put most of my winter outdoor gear at the back of my garage. Leave it to Mother Nature to keep humans on their toes.