For most of my life, I've enjoyed changes in the weather. My wife might argue that I've loved weather too much! After all, I used to check the forecast religiously a couple of times a day, and I was in Nirvana when we got cable and I found that there was a 24 hour national news channel (The Weather Channel) plus--more importantly for me--a LOCAL 24 hour weather channel that broadcast a local radar ALL DAY LONG! (Don't get me started about how excited I was when I found out that I could get on the Internet and see all kinds of radars!)
As a young, young child I remember being thrilled by electrical storms, excited and frightened by the deafening thunder and the bright flashes of lightning. As a school child I awoke on January and February mornings and ran to the window to see if the inches of snow forecast the night before had silently fallen during the night. If it had, I'd climb into my bed and turn on the transistor radio and listen to Russ Hatter on 1490 WFKY in Frankfort to see if, yes, Virginia, there WAS school today (There's a reference that no one outside of zip code 40601 is going to get) or if--maybe, just maybe--we had one of those most magical of days: a snow day.
Even as an adult I loved the weather. A steady rain in the spring relaxed me in a way I can't really describe. I distinctly remember one day in 1995 when I lived in Covington. Our house there backed up to a wooded area maybe 1/2 mile deep. One afternoon it rained a steady, strong rain. I opened one of the bedroom windows that faced the back yard and the woods. A cool breeze instantly blew into the room, and that combined with the steady, even sound of the falling rain hitting the ground and the leaves put me in an almost comatose state. I really couldn't tell you how long I sat there just enjoying the rain. Could have been hours. Most likely was several minutes. I'm not sure. My point is I used to love the weather.
Not anymore. As I alluded to a few posts ago, electrical storms still frighten me, but in a completely different way. Now whenever I hear thunder or see lightning, I think, "Great! What electronic system at work is going to get screwed up by this?" We have precautions in place--commercial class surge protectors, battery backups, generators--but no system is perfect, and there are many times when I have to come and fix a problem. So as I sit in my house with the kids and my wife and talk about how exciting thunderstorms are, I think, "Come on, Erlanger. Don't lose power!"
In the hot summer I worry about computers or servers overheating if the air conditioning goes out in a building. When it rains a BUNCH I worry about the server rooms that are at ground level flooding. Two days ago during a strong rain the roof of one of the schools in the district started mysteriously leaking. And I don't mean leaking a little--I mean leaking like a water faucet was turned on. We couldn't figure out in the driving rain where the leak was coming from, but the leak was following a line in the roof of the building. As I followed that line I saw where it was headed: right towards the main server closet of the building! It was still several rooms away, but if the rain kept up I'd be in trouble. I had the building custodian check every 20 minutes to make sure the leak hadn't moved closer to the server room (In the end it didn't make it there).
Even snow days aren't as exciting for me. Sure, it's nice to have a surprise day off with the kids, but the snow day generates two hours of work for me as the unexpected off day causes us to alter our yearly school calendar, which creates a mountain of paperwork that has to be generated, approved by the Board of Education, and then sent to the state Department of Education.
So my love for weather is a casualty of my job.
On the other hand, my wife might say that's not necessarily a bad thing.
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