We're finally beginning to understand the rest of the country's fascination with the Weather Channel

When you live in Southern California, there's rarely a compelling reason to make frequent checks of the weather forecast. Most of the time the weather is what the paper says it's going to be, and most of the time that's dry, sunny or partly cloudy, mildly chilly in the winter and warm the rest of the year. Being a native, I could never understand how weather forecasts could warrant their own cable channel and numerous Web sites. Now that we live here in Boulder I have a whole new appreciation for Americans' obsession with weather forecasting.

Ironically, the forecasts here are rarely accurate. But they do lead to some excitement. In the middle of last week United Airlines and Frontier started canceling flights out of and into Denver, due to predictions that a big storm was going to dump in Denver on Thursday night, and bury the foothills (us) in 12-18 inches of snow! What we did get was some disgruntled airline travelers, a light rainy misting, and the sum total of about 100 weak little snowflakes. Then temps in the mid 70s over the weekend.

Of course, it's not just local weather that affects us. Jason was due to leave on a trip to New York yesterday. We were on the way to drop him off at the airport at 9:30am when he got an alert on his phone that his flight was delayed 5 hours due to weather in NYC. We decided to turn back to home, he spent 2 hours at home and then went to the airport, and after two more delays and finally cancellation of the flight, he was home at 6:30 or so to put the kids to bed. Since we're headed to LA at the end of the week, he scuttled the trip and will do his meetings by phone. We're hoping for warm, dry and sunny,by the way.