Doubly under the weather

I was recently “under the weather”, both literally and figuratively. We had several weeks with few sunny days (though some cloudy days did have some sunny breaks), and lots of rain, often heavy rain. Then I had more on top of that.

The first week in June, I started feeling bad. It started as a very mild cold the first weekend in June, and that ebbed and flowed, so to speak, for around a week after that. I wasn’t particularly sneezy or have a constantly runny nose, though both have happened at times. Mainly, I just felt yucky, and sometimes my sinuses felt angry. I didn’t have a fever, though, which is part of the reason I sometimes thought it felt more like a bout of allergies than a cold. Even so, I felt pretty bad on a couple days.

I ventured out again on Thursday of last week, once I felt sure the affliction had passed. I used an abundance of caution because I went to visit my mother-in-law, and certainly didn’t want to pass a bug to her.

And then there was the weather, too.

In general, cloudy and rainy days aren’t that important, really, except that temperatures also dropped a lot (have I ever mentioned how much I hate cold temperatures?), and there seemed to be an awful lots of rainy days. The rainy weather is dreary all on its own, but it also means my solar panels make far less power on what are already shorter days (though, as I said yesterday, the daylight hours were two seconds longer than Saturday…). That affects what chores I can do—or, at least, what I’m willing to pay to do in the daytime.

At the end of May, there was a storm in Hamilton that caused a “mini tornado” in an area a couple kilometres from me, though the weather wasn’t as severe in my neighbourhood. However, at the same time that the suspected “mini tornado” struck, there was a torrential downpour in my neighbourhood, so much so that I had to turn the TV volume way up so I could hear it over the rain. The winds didn’t seem strong here, though.

That was only one of several storms with heavy downpours in May, so many, in fact, that I assumed it had been a rainy month, but apparently not. According to MetService, the rain accumulation in Hamilton in May of this year was completely aligned with May of last year and the historical data, too—which is a pretty good argument for not relying on mere perception, especially when the actual data is available.

Okay, fine: The amount of rain that fell in May was actually quite ordinary, even though it didn’t seem that way. Maybe it was the fact the days were shorter, and the fairly constant cloudcover—which isn’t tracked in data, as far as I can tell—is probably what affected my (incorrect) perception of rainy weather. Just cloudy, then.

All of which means that the actual rainfall in May wasn’t as bad as it seemed to me at the time, and my June disease affliction wasn’t as bad as a “real” illness. In fact, I sometimes still have times I’m a bit sneezy with a briefly runny nose, so maybe it’s just some sort of winter allergy, or whatever.

Winter is never pleasant for me, regardless of the amount of rain that actually falls in any given week, and this year has been no different. I’m glad I quarantined myself for my mother-in-law’s sake, even if my seeming disease affliction really were “just” allergies. The yucky feeling was real, even if my perception of rainfall may have been based on alternative facts. I blame winter