re: #54 brookly red

Hint: move south.

Yeah, come down here. Enjoy the soothing pitter-pat of golfball-sized hail making your car look like it was massaged by a flock of ball peen hammers every spring. Enjoy tornado warnings every other day for 3 weeks that never never pan out, and just when you start to ignore them and stop feeling anxiety every time the siren goes off, a real tornado tears through a neighborhood a few blocks away.

Enjoy the 100+ degree temps from July through August, during which your electricity bill will go through the roof. Marvel at the amazingly frequent stories of infants left to bake to death inside locked cars, and of joggers and bicyclists who die of acute dehydration because they think carrying around a water bottle is for limp-wristed sissies. If you live along the Gulf coast, enjoy your annual hurricanes and floods. Enjoy not being able to buy homeowner’s insurance for less than what it would cost to just replace your house and all your belongings out of pocket.

Enjoy the “Autumn”, all 3 weeks of it, as the temps drop below 60 and people start breaking out the parkas and firewood. Enjoy the first freeze of the year, during which 0.5” of ice accumulation will shut down your entire city for at least a day, more likely two or three. This is because when moisture of any kind falls out of the sky, people lose all ability to drive (DFW drivers are notoriously insane year-round, it should be noted), and the unwritten rule of the road becomes, “when in doubt, close your eyes and floor it.” Many people who own large 4WD vehicles (read: 75% of all drivers) are either completely ignorant of 6th-grade physics and the concept of frictional coefficient, or else are convinced that the mass of their vehicle somehow exempts them from Newton’s laws.

But apart from that, yeah, the south is a great place to go if you don’t like the weather where you are.