Return to Same Old Weather Pattern

If someone out there remembers how the summer weather in San Marcos use to be, I’d appreciate them letting me know. I remember really hot days followed by clear, cool nights back in the forties and fifties. If I said I remember the sixties, some people would call me a liar.

When I moved here, I acquired a really nice, computer controlled telescope anticipating that I’d have many clear nights in which to search for that elusive comet, the one that every amateur dreams about finding before he passes through the eyepiece into the great mirror in the sky. Well, 17 nights in six years. That’s not a very good track record. I admit that some nights were possible if I had a windshield wiper to keep the sweat from flooding the eyepiece. There’s also the installation of an unshielded street lamp by a neighbor that has created uncharitable thoughts in my attitude towards neighborly activities. Also, I’ve aged and can’t carry the mount out into the side yard without taking it completely apart. Also, who’d have known, sixty years ago, that I couldn’t spend hours out in  subzero frosty nights like the ones we had in Oklahoma where I was growing up.

I’ve been called a querulous old fool for digging up wonderful  memories and trying to compare them with current experience. This is a hazard of  age, and if you want to avoid it, you’re welcome to miss the party, though I’m sure you haven’t thought of it quite that way. Nevertheless, clouds blowing in off the Gulf and light pollution from major car distributors and their acres of shiny automobiles have cause me to think of migrating from what I thought would be a comfortable, astronomy-friendly climate back to my beloved mountains in California where at least the world had a horizon and avocados weren’t as hard as Granny Smith apples.