When the forecast gets it wrong (complimentary)

The weather alerts for yesterday morning were really (and I cannot stress this enough) really on the fence about if it would rain or not throughout the course of the day; variations of "light rain", "mild rain" "scattered showers" kept pinging my phone and to highlight how prevalent it was, I muted notifications to the weather app for a few hours as a result.

I'm such a fucking dork for weather (probably because I grew up in a very temperate area of California where seasons were optional) that I never mute weather app notifications!! It takes a lot to get me to this point!

Anyway, as it turns out it did not rain!

The snow came out of nowhere. I went outside to grab a package about an hour before taking these gifs (during all the notification nonsense) and it was sunny out there. Sunny!!

That said, I'm never going to begrudge snow. The year we moved to Connecticut we were granted snow on Thanksgiving, snow on Christmas, and then both a "snow squall" and a "bomb cyclone" (things I'd never even heard of!) followed by several years of MAYBE one real snow per season. If even that. Total busts.

This year's different. Starting with the day after Christmas 2025, we've had snow on the ground more days than not, which like is what I was expecting when I moved from a literal desert to New England!! But the weather spirits did not have that in store for me until now.

And it kind of makes me laugh that as a society, we view small talk about things like weather as perfunctory or "safe" (for lack of better term) topics of discussion, if not outright boring.

I take issue with the boring part obviously because like, it's a fucking miracle that the heat of the sun hitting a part of the ocean I'll maybe never see (in body of water form anyway) causes water vapor to turn into clouds that will rain or snow on me later? I get that I sound like a shower thoughts stoner right now but that's fucking magical, man.

BUT the "safe" part also makes me laugh a bit because like - "don't talk politics or religion" as the "polite conversation guideline" goes is becoming increasingly untenable. I don't even mean in the "I wanna make sure I'm not sitting down to dinner with a bigot" way where I test the waters with mentioning a trans friend's marriage or that I work in immigration law, but in that even the most seemingly mundane "Crazy weather we're having, eh?" comment is likely discussing the end result of human-enacted climate crisis that is perpetuated due to a political and economic motivation of denying its existence.

To obviously preface, I'm not a meteorologist or climate scientist; I'm a musician, photographer and artist who has a day job in immigration law, so anything I know about weather, climate, ecological disaster is a result of reading shit up on my own but it's not hard to find studies (or it USED to be before the current US administration started removing resources from the internet) that show human impact on climate has been nothing short of devastating even BEFORE we started fracking, draining reservoirs for AI server farms etc.

So I'm over here "Damn, finally we're getting more snow than usual! It's so pretty!" while also in the back of my head knowing that's.....probably not a good thing.

Like the icicles thing, I'm gonna enjoy the little things while I got em, even if it is a possible portent of bad days to come

Plus it's been a while since I got to do some good gifography and falling snow is a great subject for the medium.

Hope wherever you live isn't getting climate destroyed, or if it is you can oust the politicians and corporations responsible.