I’ve been working on "Artie the Pearl" and "Paulie Five Fingers" stories this week, which is one reason why I’ve been as AWOL as an American President. But that’s only part of it.

The real reason I’ve been slacking off is because the weather has been so nice. I live in California, a place synonymous with nice weather (except for floods, earthquakes, wildfires, drought, and temperatures above 110. Details, details). But that’s the 95% of California that doesn’t contain Siskiyou County. This is a sturdier California here, one where the pine trees don’t have to be watered and they outnumber the people, and snow sometimes reaches the eaves of the houses.

Seasons aren’t as certain here. We can get sixty degree days in February, and in 1987, we got six inches of snow on the Fourth of July. Spring and fall aren’t as evident. Last year, fall was on a Thursday. Literally. On Wednesday afternoon, the last week in October, it was 82 degrees. By Friday morning, it was 18, and it was four months before we saw 50 degrees again.

Spring can be pretty dramatic here. The last of the snow melts, the moldy smell goes away, and everything turns vivid green, except for the old wise oaks, which know better than to trust a Siskiyou spring, and don’t bud until late May. Late frosts usually wipe out fruit crops, and it’s easy to spot newcomers to the region in late May; they’re the ones staring dismayed at their thermometers on cold June mornings and saying, "Shit! My tomatoes!"

Summer is fairly reliable. The only time you get July and August frosts is when you go camping (according to ancient legend, of course) and those summer snows rarely amount to much. But generally, you can expect highs between 75 and 120, and lows between 25 and 70. If that seems a little tentative for a forecast, keep in mind that Siskiyou County has more climate variation than all of Canada. Where I live, highs around 90 and lows around 45 are the norm. Summers are great here. Go ten miles in any direction, and it’s completely different.

But winter, with fourteen foot snow falls, wild storms, and amazing wind-chill factors, is the headliner. Once it arrives, everyone just kind of hunkers down. It isn’t as savage as the Ottawa winters of my youth, where you could go weeks without the temperature ever getting above zero, but it is cold enough, and usually very wet. Not a good place for people with Seasonal Affective Disorder.

March is very much a part of winter. Our first year here, we got five feet of snow on Saint Patrick’s Day, and we know that snow falls measured in feet can occur right up until the end of April. It’s common to see cherry blossoms and snowflakes falling together.

Each year, we get a little warm spell. Usually this occurs in late February or early March, and isn’t unique to us. We would get three or four days where it would go into the 60s, sometimes even hitting 70 degrees. Everyone would sigh with relief and joy, and marvel at the rate with which the snow was melting.

This year is different.

This year, that "little warm spell" began on March 5, when it hit 66 degrees. Everyone liked that. The next day, it was 71, and everyone liked that even more. It tied the record high for the date.

Sixteen days later, it is still continuing. It’s been in the high sixties and low seventies every day since March 5^th, and is expected to continue for at least a few more days. All the snow is gone, and everything is budding and blossoming far too early.

We’ve broken the high record for the date seven times during this heat wave, and tied it four other times. It was 78 yesterday, in a month where it’s never been above 80.

We replaced about half our windows with double-glazed jobs, energy efficient, a couple of years ago, and this reduced the number of storm windows we put up each fall. Thus I could let the house air out without taking the storm windows down. Only a fool removes the storm windows before Memorial Day.

If temperatures returned to normal tomorrow (and they won’t) it would be the hottest March in our history, twelve degrees above normal. In fact, it would be the hottest APRIL in our history.

Whenever I have to go to the Valley or Southern California in the winter, I get that same surreal sense of discontinuity. I’m used to leaving deep snow in the morning and looking at tulips two hours later in Redding under a warm sun, trees all leaved out and grass a vivid green. And then returning to the snow that afternoon. But it never feels right.

Local lore has it that after a little spring break, winter returns with redoubled ferocity and really hammers us. Two days of sixty five degrees followed by three feet of snow followed by a week in the teens. Bye bye, fruit crop.

So everyone is walking around simultaneously wearing expressions of amazed exaltation and abject terror. We’ve racked up so many unearned "unexpected nice weather points" this year that everyone expects April to be one long Antarctic blizzard. We’re all in T-shirts, but have the GoreTex hanging next to the door. Nobody has turned on the lawn water or put the snow equipment away. People are taking off their studded tires, but are keeping the chains handy and exchanging gloomy jokes about how they just guaranteed snow by changing their tires.

People often take isolated local weather events and try to say they show or don’t show that global warming is taking place. It’s a goofy thing to do, even when it goes for weeks, like this one has. It says nothing one way or another about global warming, and local lore might be right; April could well be more like February. Global warming or not, I have a back yard that needs cutting and it’s only March 21^st.

But a new study just came out, showing CO2 levels are at record highs.

A heat wave doesn’t say anything about global warming, just as a baby being born doesn’t mean we’re having a population explosion.

But expect to see ever bigger and better heat waves – and fiercer storms – as we go along. Just not every day, every month, or even every year. But expect them, nevertheless.