Partly Cloudy With A Chance Of Inevitable

The 2010 Winter Olympics will not be held in Washington D.C. this year. There will be no hundred-yard Bipartisan Shuffle. No Pairs Ice-Filibuster. No thousand meter Staredown. Instead, that honor will be Vancouver's, where rain will be moving in for the weekend. This ensures that the Ladies Freestyle Puddlejumping will be allowed to go on, but most of the snow and ice-related events will have to shiver in anticipation of what could be.
My good friend and roommate from the olden days used to say this about the weather in my hometown: "If you don't like the weather in Boulder, MOVE!" His was a play on the whimsical notion that if you didn't like the weather in our little town at the foot of the Rockies, all you had to do was wait fifteen minutes. I feel more akin to Mark Twain's assertion that "Everyone complains about the weather, but no one does anything about it." It ranks up there with a discussion of the effects of gravity. As a natural phenomenon, the best we can hope to do is move out from under it.
Me? I've learned to complain about rain and when the temperature dips below sixty degrees. Scraping ice off a windshield is now a vague inconvenience when I travel up into the mountains in search of snow instead of the daily ritual that it used to be back in my youth. I feel my son's pain as he listens to the stories of "snow days" back east, and even though I have tried to explain that those days still end up on the end of the academic calendar at the end of the year, he still feels exploited. By the weather.
The recent blizzards and torrential rains have made discussion of global warming more exciting again, but the truth is for most of us it just gives us a little more science to hang on our regularly scheduled harping about the weather "in our neck of the woods." Punxsutawney Phil or Al Roker, it's all still pretty much your best guess. I'll stick to my trusty old weather rock.