Weird weather

We haven't quite got to the 'four seasons in a day' state, but the weather this year has been extremely weird.

Normally spring and autumn - the most comfortable seasons - are extremely short; each one lasts maybe one month with very changeable weather.

This year, the winter was fairly mild, and more importantly, fairly dry. As we are still a somewhat agriculture based economy, a dry winter wreaked havoc with the crops.

Spring officially started a few weeks ago with the equinox, although we had already felt the change about a week before that. Since then, however, the weather has gone wild. On Friday, the temperature was 36.5 degrees Celsius in the shade; extremely hot and unpleasant. Now, less than 48 hours later, it's only 15 degrees outside and raining heavily. A change of 20 degrees C in two days: no wonder I get flu so often from this changeable weather.

I'm not sure that this rain is even good for agricultural purposes as there aren't any crops in need of it at the moment. Of course, it won't go to waste and will save us having to water the garden for a week, but the timing could have been better (had it been a month earlier, for example).

I live in a peculiar local area regarding rain. If one drew a 3 km radius circle around my kibbutz, one would find that the annual rainfall within that circle is much lower than the rainfall just outside the circle. This fact was apparently known in ancient times, which is why the neighbouring town is called Bet Shemesh, the house of the sun. The sun won't allow the rain to fall. I don't mind this too much as I have an aversion to the rain, but as someone with agricultural connections, it's not too good. Fortunately, a fair number of our fields are outside the circle, so they enjoy a reasonable amount of rainfall.