Summer is here in a big way this week, despite the storm interlude on Tuesday. The past few days have been hot and almost cloudless, and the humidity is starting to creep upward. The weather has not been all that oppressive (although a friend of mine points out that that perception may be due to the fact that I’ve acclimated, not because of the weather itself), but that’s bound to change in the next several days when the temps start to rise into the 90s. There’s supposedly a cold front on the way but the National Weather Service seems to doubt that it will make it this far south. As the long-range forecast on the National Weather Service page says:

The theme for the long term weather pattern is consistency …. The consistency from run to run supports a good degree of confidence that the long wave pattern affecting our weather will change very little if hardly at all.

On my way home Tuesday night, a brief but intense deluge came down from the sky—a ripping thunderstorm on the first day of summer. I was unprepared, having forgotten to check the National Weather Service on the way out the door in the morning and consequently having also forgotten my umbrella. I was soaked through by the time I got home (a walk of seven minutes or so), but it wasn’t necessarily unpleasant—the temperature was still fairly high so the rain was, instead of cold and miserable, almost refreshing.