The winter season has passed and taken its weather with it. Weather happens whether we like it or not, so we grin and bare it. We are blessed in southern California because with weather we most often get to bare it, not  bear it. Ha-ha-yeah!

As you know we have many house guests, our friends and family from Elsewhere, USA. Winter is not the favorite season Elsewhere, so that’s when many visitors come. They are good people, but have sometimes suffered brain freeze…with symptoms such as these absurd jibs and jabs:

• A college-educated botanist thinking that we had misting rainfall, like clockwork, at 2:30 a.m. Daily. Uhm, that would be our sprinkler system on its automatic timer, an earthly mechanism more precisely timed than God. He has other provenance to train. We in southern California take care of our own.
• A visitor whimpers because Highway One along the Big Sur coast is shrouded in fog, so that he can’t see the ocean. Uhm, the Pacific Ocean that you want to see apparently doesn’t want to be seen. You see, this enormous body of water is the world’s weather machine. It causes the fog that rises as high as the cliffs and as far as your eye can see – in cahoots with the warm land. It’s called Science and Nature, and Tourism doesn’t run it.
• A judgmental tourist stating that ‘all that traffic on those awful freeways shouldn’t be allowed’ due to the burnished smog generated to obscure our hilltop view. I turned to him and mildly said, “You drove, didn’t you? Should we start with eliminating your rental vehicle?”
• A persistently mopey broad daily announced that, because of the overcast June morning skies, it definitely would rain. Every day she was in our home. What a crank! Even when each successive sunny day proved her false, she insisted on her verbal doom and gloom. Thank goodness she packed up her personality and took it home with her. Argh!
• A Midwestern visitor complaining of the rain that fell in buckets outside our home, spoiling her entitlement for sunshine…while watching the TV news-and-weather  display how the Jet Stream had dipped down from Canada and transformed our rainy abundance – across the mountains and plains into a snow blizzard in her hometown –
• Demanding floral tourists complaining that fog made it difficult to see the Rose Parade floats aligned in the park the day after the parade. Parade day had, as usual, been brilliantly sunny with a bowl of blue sky abundant for anyone. Later my friend, Kay, told me that I should have empathized, saying “you’ll like your weather better when you get home”… They endured a month long barrage of sleet, black ice, and blizzards with occasional road fog ‘back home again in Indiana’. It was Nature’s revenge for bad-natured house guests, donchatink?