Colding

My friends here in Kentucky enjoy watching the Weather Channel - and what is there not to love about a 24hr. station dedicated to all things weather-related? They have a morning show with three meteorologists who sit and chat about climatic changes, and then take turns going to the big projected map and showing high pressure systems colliding with low pressure ones (resulting in... weather). Now, television weather people tend to come across as overly genki, slightly apologetic prognosticators - so, we tend to forget that many of them are part of the earth science community (and, thus, scientists, not shamans). Rememeber, Socrates and Ben Franklin were meteorologists, too!
Which brings me to the fact that in the two (+) weeks I have been here, I have seen more extreme weather than in the past two years back in Boston (however , ironically, after having left home, they have been deluged by rain in biblical proportions - which leads me to believe that I am in fact a talisman of warding off catastrophic weather). Around here it has suddenly gotten chilly and big storm fronts sweep past hourly (supposedly there is some community up in Indiana who gets whacked by most of these systems) , but nothing really bad has happened yet. Personally, I am anxious about seeing my first tornado, but if indeed I have some sort of calming effect on the atmosphere, then perhaps the weather here could have been much, much worse... Or, at least that's what I like telling myself...