Summer Stirrings

Summer is almost always cool in San Francisco, but this year there is something special about it. The weather has been on a continuum since late winter ... winter that just doesn't want to give it up, to the point that we are actually approaching winter again in this second half of the year, and I find myself wondering: is this weather the leftover of last winter, or the harbinger of the winter to come?

It has been breezy with high clouds, tons and tons of high clouds, on most sunny days since mid-March when it was not outright raining or heavily overcast. The winds are warm now -- it is summer, after all, but the stirring in the atmosphere from winter is just NOT calming down like normal. Parts of the San Francisco Bay Area and San Joaquin Valley that are usually baking hot are 10-15 degrees cooler than normal, and there are dark clouds still puffing up daily over the Sierra Nevada Mountains. It feels like early May, not early July, in many places.

Oh, did I mention that I may have seen my first tornado in person, in the San Joaquin Valley of California -- or at least, my first TALL dust devil, whirling over a field I was traveling past, no more than two football fields away? It had the classic shape and cyclonic movement, just no cloud above it for it to be a LEGIT landspout or tornado, at least not that I could see. if I did not know the makeup of how tornadoes formed, I'm sure I would have been panicked...

Something is going on ... summer is stirring things up around California, and so here we have a little piece of music on the move here, full of the energy I feel in the atmosphere!