The Inversion and Other Weather

This weather is beyond my ken.

Weather in Utah is usually strange, but over the past few weeks it's been stranger than usual.

First, there was the inversion. The inversion is a dramatic drop in air quality that we periodically experience. It's like playing the Floor Is Lava except it's the Air Is Inversion, which is a much worse game because there's no safe place and everybody suffers.

I've heard a lot of people blame their illnesses on the inversion, and I was excited about this. I thought maybe it was kind of like when Mercury was in retrograde and people just blamed everything on that. Like, "No wonder I had to get braces twelve years ago! Mercury is totally in retrograde right now!" It's always good to have a scapegoat, and so I was looking forward to making the inversion the scapiest goat of all.

However, apparently we could only blame ears, nose, and throat problems on the inversion because there are actually some scientific reasonings behind that stuff. But it worked out, because I had a lot of ear, nose, and throat problems during the inversion. My throat burned. My nose ran. And my ears popped constantly, like I was deep-sea diving or riding in the Empire State Building elevator with a cold.

To be fair, I often have ear, nose, and throat problems. Such problems aren't really new, since I've always had pet allergies, asthma, and a penchant for sinus infections. I also had the croup when I was two or three years old. (I remember it surprisingly vividly. First my parents ran a hot shower in the bathroom and made me breathe the steam. Then they took me out on the porch near the driveway and let me breathe the fresh night air. I'd hardly ever been outside at that time of night before, and I found it very interesting and beautiful. That's probably when I realized I was a night person, not a day person.)

But I wasn't the only one who was sick. Everybody was sick during the inversion. Baby Brother coughed and coughed and threw up blood and coughed some more. My parents discussed whether to take him to the emergency room, which you normally don't debate when little boys are throwing up blood. But as my parents' insurance now charges them literally 2,300% more for emergency room visits than it did a few years ago, and as my mother the RN thought the blood might just be from a broken blood vessel, they watched Baby Brother carefully and waited a little while to see what happened. Nothing happened, except that Baby Brother coughed a lot more and went to sleep. But there was no more blood...and he was soon fine. Which, let me tell you, I was very glad of.

After several days, the horrible inversion cleared away, and the sun came out. And boy, when it arrived, it really arrived. We went from weather as depressing as any that Charles Dickens ever made an orphan endure on the streets of London and into what looked...and felt...just like spring.

This beautiful weather went on for a few days. Then, one day, a storm rolled in,

It literally rolled, like the waves off the coast of Kealia Beach. A guy at my work stood by the window, eating chips and watching the storm chase away the sunshine. Then there were horrible winds. Then hail. Then thick, thick snow. And then, within a few hours, it was sunny again, and it's more or less been that way ever since.

I do not get the weather in this state.