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Foul Weather Friends
Thu Mar 24, 2005
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton and this is The Weather Notebook.
"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 Connoisseur'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.
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