Foul Weather Friends
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Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton and this is the Weather Notebook.

DAVID LASKIN: "What a downpour!" I raved one torrential afternoon when my teenage daughter Alice and a friend showed up dripping at our front door. "I can't wait to talk to my weather friends about this storm."

Bryan: Commentator David Laskin.

"Weather friends?" Alice snickered to her pal. "My dad is soooo weird. I mean, hello, do you have weather friends? Does anyone else in the universe have weather friends?"

Sure, my other weather friends. Who else are you going to call when a bomb cyclone threatens to spin off a mega wind storm in the next 12 hours? And who's going to commiserate with you when high pressure hangs in for endless sunny days and all the really cool storms steer around you like girls at an eighth grade dance? I count myself extremely lucky because my weather friends are not just fanatics like me - but informed fanatics who do weather for a living and patiently answer all my stupid questions. I doubt this would cut much mustard with my teeny-bopper daughter, but I'm on a first-name basis with the people who write our area forecast discussions, I'm constantly on the phone with the local weather pundit who goes on television when major storms threaten, and I've even hung out with some of the Weather Channel's highest rated on-camera meteorologists - OCMs as we call them in biz. Top that Alice!

Of course my wife thinks we're all insane - and has even coined the term "meteoromania" to describe our condition. Let them laugh. Everybody has fair weather friends. But a foul weather friend - now that's a friend indeed.

David Laskin revels in the raindrops in Seattle Washington. He's author of several books on weather including: "Rains all the Time: A Connisseur's History of Rain in the Pacific Northwest." The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory and is supported in part by the National Science Foundation.