Spring?

So it's springtime...I guess. It was supposed to be 98 degrees today and tomorrow, so I might even call it summer. And where did spring go?? Not cool, weather. (Both figuratively and literally speaking, of course.)

Of course, along with spring comes my new set of vocabulary I picked up on when we moved to Oklahoma. Words like tornadic, or wall cloud, or supercells or dryline or rain-wrapped. They become part of our normal conversation as we sit around and analyze the clouds, or when there is the potential of severe weather in the weekly forecast. I'll admit, it gives us a bit of an adrenaline rush as we wait in anticipation of what might become of the forecasted storms. And a bit of excitement as we rush outside and watch the unbelievably beautiful clouds take shape and travel and rotate off in the distance. And yet, with it comes a bit of terror as we sit glued to the TV, wondering when we need to put into action our safety plan.

Now that it's May, we wonder what will become of this weather.

Interestingly enough, every since we've moved to Oklahoma, we've experienced a number of records or unusual weather patterns. The summer we moved here, Oklahoma was going seeing an unusually HOT summer. Something like 50+ days in triple digits. I most definitely wondered what in the world we were doing here!

Late fall of that same year, my sister Katie was visiting and we experienced an unusually large earthquake that even shook our house.

When the following spring rolled around, there was an unspotted rain-wrapped tornado that hopscotched halfway across Norman before the sirens even went off - after it passed by our backyard, knocking over our swingset and doing some damage to our fence (while my sister-in-law and I watched out the window with 4 kids under the age of 4).

The next spring brought the well-known Moore tornado, and the record-breaking massive El Reno tornado - both relatively close to where we live.

This "spring" we have already seen record-breaking high temperatures, making it feel more like mid-July rather than beginning of May.

So what is next? Apparently Oklahoma weather is unpredictable, so I'm not going to even take a guess.

But if it were up to me, I'd vote for the "coolest summer in history." :)