Weather

I assume that all farmers are obsessed with the weather -- but I sometimes suspect that Farmer Bill takes it to an extreme.  One day (actually many days, but who's counting...) I came upon him checking the radar on the National Weather Service website.  [Farmer Bill & I agree that using other weather websites makes no sense, since they all get their information from the NWS anyway.]  He was looking to see whether we could expect rain that afternoon.  I looked at him watching the radar screen, I looked out the window at the black clouds gathering in the western sky, I looked at him watching the radar screen.  I shook my head -- figuratively or literally I don't recall -- and went on with whatever I was doing.  He's got reading the radar movement down to a fine art and is surprisingly accurate a lot of the time.  His daybook/calendar is a Minnesota Weatherguide calendar that I've bought for him every year for about two decades now.  Christmas morning wouldn't be complete without Farmer Bill paging through the calendar and coming up with a couple of trivia questions about Minnesota weather.

Of course Minnesota has a lot of weather to talk about.  We have cold winters, hot summers, rain and wind, hail and sleet.  So Minnesotans, in general, are obsessed with weather.  We complain about the heat and humidity in the summer and the cold in the winter.  We complain if there isn't enough snow and if there's too much snow (which amount seems to vary from person to person, if you can imagine that).  We whine when it's dry and whimper when it's wet.  Except for Farmer Bill.  He doesn't complain, whimper, or whine about the weather.  Like so many things for him, it is what it is.  Now, he may privately think that getting 90+ inches of snow last winter was ridiculous.  And he probably doesn't like it much when it rains every other day -- putting severe cramps in his spring work schedule.  But he doesn't say much; he just gets on with it, whatever 'it' is.