I was disappointed today by the weatherman. That is not unusual, of course. I think all meterologists should go into politics. They lie to us nearly every day about the upcoming weather and are so vague that after listening to a five minute discourse on the latest doppler radar readings you are still confused about whether to bring that umbrella, the shovel or the sunscreen. Still, knowing that they lie to us every day and are not the least bit reliable, we would still bring the umbrella if they said rain. But today the weatherman said no white Christmas and I think he was telling the truth for a change.

A few days ago we had snow, just enough to make it all white and not enough to cause shoveling. In New England you don't bother to shovel unless the snow is higher than the bumper of the car. We had just come off a brisk week of below freezing temperatures and then a little snow and finally, it looked a bit like Christmas. But as happens here we went from 3F yesterday morning to over 60F today and after a quick downpour all residual snow is now gone. That's -16C and +15C respectively, for you Celcius users.

And that's another thing. It has been years now since the American public turned its nose up at the very idea of changing to celcius and the metric system and still all the silly bank clocks show the temperature in both Celcius and Fahrenheit and naturally you drive by at the exact moment they are showing the temp in Celcius and have gone far past by the time it shows the real temperature. Now to a New Englander, telling me is it -9F is bad enough, but if you tell me it is -22 I am going to think it is really cold. I might even wear a coat. Conversely, in the summer if is is 104F and you tell me it is only 40 degrees I am going to hit you. (Well, I am hot and cranky).

And we never went for meters and liters or even metres and litres. I can still buy my milk in pints and quarts and gallons, but for some reason the soda bottlers want me to buy 2 liter bottles while still selling 12 oz cans. They are confused but not so sure of themselves that everything is in liters. They print the ounces on the 2 liter bottles. They must have retooled the machines to make that particular size bottle and it is not cost effective to change back even though there is no earthly reason to continue to sell 1 and 2 liter bottles.

And why is it that only Americans still cling to the English system of weights and measures while all Commonwealth nations have conformed to the metric system?

And while we are on the subject of conforming, what is it with these "universal" illustrated road signs? You know the ones that instead of proclaiming simply "No Passing on the Right" have a picture of two cars and one going by the other on the right side with a big red circle around it and a line through it. By the time I have passed the other car on the right to get a good look at it and decipher the sign it is too late. I don't have time to stare at a sign and figure out what the little pictorial means, I will drive off the road staring at something that long. For crying out loud, why did I bother to learn to read?

Where was I? Oh yeah, snow. Well I like snow and all, it is very picturesque. Very Currier and Ives. I think it should snow on Christmas Eve and then not so much after that. Unfortunately Christmas in December is not a snow guarantee. In New England the weather hasn't settled yet into winter. We may have had snow in October but that does not preclude a warm and balmy Christmas day in December. If you want a guarantee of extended and unrelenting cold, snow and ice, you want January. I have been petitioning for moving Christmas to January for ages but so far have not garnered much support. So tomorrow for Christmas it will be mostly sunny and 32 degrees, or 0 Celsius. Unless, we are lucky and the weatherman lied again.