Seattle weather........

You know that saying "if you don't like the weather in Seattle, just stick around ten minutes?" Well, it's true. (No? You don't know that saying? Well, you obviously don't live in Seattle. Psh.) Anyway, yesterday was a perfect example of that. The morning was cool and crisp, but I left the house wearing a shirt and a sweater over it and was perfectly comfy (never mind that these days I'm not cold - EVER - so I haven't worn a coat but maybe twice this entire winter). It's spring now, after all, and if things were progressing normally, yesterday would have been punctuated by sunshine and perhaps a comfortable breeze now and then. But that's in the normal world. We live in Seattle. So, after the relatively mild morning, there was some "sunshine breakthrough". This is a valid weather term here - akin to "scattered showers", "periods of rain followed by showers", and "intermittent rain showers". At this very moment of beautiful sun I received a call from a friend asking me to go to the tulip fields. Yes, we have these really cool tulip fields here that bloom in April and attract zillions of people snapping pictures of rows and rows of color. It sounded like a perfect afternoon of photography - except I had to go home to supervise my offspring in cleaning our pigsty, oops, house, so I declined the invite. And a good thing, too, because not long after that I got a hankering for a Frappe from McDonald's. No, that's not relevant to the story, but it does explain why I went on a "treat run" in the afternoon, toting Hannah along, because she jumped at the opportunity to escape Cinderella-dom and stop cleaning for fifteen minutes. Off we went to Mickey D's and sometime in those fifteen minutes the sky got a little darker and the wind picked up. When we arrived home I saw an ominous black cloud and I said "look, there's a snow cloud" and Hannah laughed. But fifteen minutes later, I was, like, "what the hail?" because hail was coming down in sheets and covering the ground with white, not unlike actual snow! And then we realized that the hail was lasting a long time and before you know it, huge white flakes of SNOW were falling. What the fluff? Snow in April? And an hour or so later, there was still an odd combination of snow/rain/hail falling from the sky and it was COLD! The snow/rain/hail stopped and later it was just cold and wet. And this morning the trees behind my house are blooming with tiny pink flowers set against a white sky. And I detect a slight mist in the air. This afternoon, there is a good chance the sun will break through, the temperature will shoot up twenty degrees and crazy Seattleites will don shorts and sandals with socks and expensive sunglasses and walk outside desperately trying to soak up some Vitamin D for the twenty minutes or so that it lasts. Yep, that's our weather in Seattle. No attention span AT ALL.