California Sunshine

Sunday was 61 degrees and full of brilliant sunshine. Saturday was also 61 degrees and full of brilliant sunshine. According to weather.com, today is scheduled to be 63 degrees and full of brilliant sunshine. It is, I remind you all, January. This is one of the extraordinarily nice things about living in California again. And why am I leaving in two weeks? Oh right, job opportunity, better quality of living, family, culture, a future, other young people and all that.

Californians often tend to not quite appreciate what they have here anyway. It is common for people to characterize a whole winter as “awful” because of one or two rough months. Chris even had a coworker say, “I’m already sick of the rain.” This was after a scant week of rain that had been preceded by six months of drought. Ungrateful wretches.

After spending so many years away I find myself feeling a bit desperate with every sunny winter day. I see the light sparkling all around and feel driven to get out of bed, go outside and do something. If I have to work inside for most of the day I feel like a great opportunity was missed. When seven of the ten days in the future forecast indicate bountiful sunshine with not a wisp of a cloud in sight, taking full advantage of every single one of them can be exhausting.

Saturday Chris helped me get started with my running resolution and I ended up running a very hard three miles plus a bit for warming up and cooling down. Then with tired, achy muscles we got up early on Sunday and went for a 32-mile bike ride. Needless to say we were wiped out by the evening and struggled to keep our weary, drained, done in muscles up until 9:00pm when we dragged our spent carcasses into bed.

Oregon will definitely be a bit less full of glorious sunny days, but I keep telling myself it is better than the northeast and the rain will help me appreciate the sunny days. The whole, "there is no light without the dark," concept. It will probably help keep me from overdoing it in general too. And I’ll still visit the sunshine when I visit my Christopher, an even better sort of sunshine.