On Our Anniversary, Thanking A Patient Husband For Enduring Weather Geekdom

My husband Jeff enjoying the weather on our deck
in a photo taken a few years ago. It's our wedding
anniversary today, and I'm celebrating the fact
he's tolerated my weather obsession all these years.

Today is my 11th wedding anniversary (Gawd time flies!) and I'm using the occasion to profusely thank my husband for enduring all these years of weather geekdom.  

By extension, I'm also thanking all the spouses and partners of meteorologists and weather enthusiasts out there for supporting or at least putting up with all that weather talk,

My husband Jeff has tolerated the combination of ADHD and weather obsession for so long now, and he still finds it in himself to stay cheerful. 

We might be talking about, say, whether we need to put our dog Jackson in the kennel when we're away the following weekend, then, SQUIRREL!!!!!

Thunder rumbles in the distance.  My favorite kind of weather! Do I go to the window? Is it a big storm? Do I get in the truck and chase the storm down for photos and video?  Off I go, leaving Jeff wondering about dinner. And probably a lot of other things. 

Or, at night, Jeff's trying to watch "Death In Paradise," or one of those other murder mystery shows he likes. I'm sitting on the couch, scrolling social media because there's an impressive tornado outbreak going on in Texas.

Storm chasers are posting amazing photos and short videos of the twisters. So every five seconds, I push the phone in his face to share how gobsmacked I am by the photo of the tornado sending an entire barn into oblivion. Which means Jeff never does learn who killed the book author on that night's episode of "Death In Paradise."

Jeff respects science, but he is not a scientist. Somehow, however, he survives my detailed explanations of a Quasi-Linear Convective Systems and baroclinic zones without fully allowing me to see how badly his eyes are glazing over.

Jeff is a scenic set designer and a painter. He likes doing things big, so he's produced some marvelous large paintings.

Years ago, we were all sick and tired of this huge ugly painting of an owl that was gradually falling apart on my mother's living room wall.

As a gift, he produced this wonderful large painting of what appeared to be a park in September. A few of the trees in the landscape were starting to turn color, but most were still green. He created a blue sky with beautiful puffy clouds and he made the atmosphere look a bit hazy. Just a stunning piece of art. 

And how did I react to this work?  I gave a weather synopsis of what's going on in the painting. I concluded it was a warm, and somewhat humid September day, and a cold front was approaching that would give us the first taste of real autumn chill in the next couple of days. 

Yeah, I came up with that whole weather forecast. About a painting. Jeff just said, "Yes, dear."

The good news, of course is that my mother loved that painting for years until she passed away in 2022.

I also always congratulate Jeff on the accuracy of his clouds within his paintings. He likes to include expanses of sky in his landscapes.  The clouds in his paintings all look plausible. They could happen in real life. 

Which is great, because it drives me crazy to see some paintings that includes clouds that are meteorologically impossible.  Yeah, Jeff has to tolerate that obsession, too. But maybe there's a bit of a closet weather geek within him, since he knows what clouds look like and sort of how they form. 

Jeff does seem to like the gardens I've created around our house, which of course are weather dependent. He's gotten interested in how the weather helps or hurts the perennial gardens.  So maybe a little of me rubbed off on him, who knows?

So, we have had 11 years of marriage through literally all kinds of weather, and we were together a couple years before we married.

I think the weather gods are smiling on our marriage, too. From day one, actually.  Our wedding day was gorgeous. Obsessed as I am, I looked up the specifics this morning. The high that day, August 26, 2012 was 87, the low was 68 and it was mostly sunny and just a bit hazy, like in Jeff's paintings.  

They say that marriage is a path of enduring sunny bliss interrupted by the occasional storm. With Jeff, all my storm chasing seems to be actual, meteorological storms. He never creates metaphorical ones in our lives, another thing that makes me eternally grateful for Jeff.

Here's one forecast I know will be accurate:  A happy anniversary warning is in effect for Jeff. There's a 100 percent chance that I will always love him as intensely as I ever have if not more.  The love raining down will mix with, laughter, respect, awe and pride toward the man I married.  Accumulations of happy memories with him will be deep. 

The "weather pattern" that is the my joy of being married to Jeff will never change. Happy Anniversary, Chief! 

 

A Sunny Anniversary Garden Party And A Not So Stormy Marriage

Jeff Modereger and I tying the knot a 
decade ago, August 26, 2012. It's been
sunshine and blue skies since. 

 This post is only tangentially related to the weather, but that's OK, we'll manage for one day, right?

Here in St. Albans, Vermont, we're having a garden party to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary. Hard to believe Jeff and I have been married ten years, but there you go. 

Our wedding anniversary was actually this past Friday, but we decided the celebration would be today. The weather gods blessed us with a cool morning to get ready for the shindig, and the day promises to be very sunny and comfortably warm. 

On the day we married, August 26, 2012, the weather was very much like what is forecast today. It was sunny and in the 80s. 

I guess our entire marriage has been like that, from my perspective. Sunny and warm. Oh, sure, we've had our chilly. even frosty moments, like everybody does, but those quickly pass. The gusty storms of arguments pass by even faster. These storms were never severe, and didn't seem to leave behind any damage. 

It's one of the reasons I married Jeff in the first place. He has a sunny, optimistic disposition as opposed to the occasion dense fogs of pessimism I try to fight back. 

The winds of time blow strong, and things are of course different now than they were. Our young puppy Jackson of 2012 is now an old dog, not learning many new tricks. Jeff and I have aged, and I've started referring to ourselves as Statler and Waldorf.

Our surroundings are different. Jeff redesigned our decrepit house into a showcase. I took an overgrown sad property and turned it into gardens. 

I think of our marriage as a kind of force field. Knock on wood, we hope it continues. We've been lucky. Disasters have mostly not befallen us. We're like that house on the end of the street that looks fine after the tornado while all the other homes in the neighborhood are leveled.

I'm a challenging person to live with. Some scars from my sometimes problematic childhood sometimes get in the way. And my ADHD is frustrating to me, and more so to the people around me. How Jeff puts up with this, I'll never know. 

He's a strong guy, and I get nourishment from that. He's the long rainy spell to my droughts of doubt. The warm south wind that melts away my icicles of frustration. The sunshine that cuts through the low clouds and drizzle, dispersing all that to create a blue sky life for me. 

We look forward to the future, even though we don't know what that will bring. Long range weather forecasts are seldom reliable, and guessing what things will be like in five to ten years is just as iffy. 

They say that climate is your personality and a day's weather is your mood. The Climate of Jeff is steady,  stable, comfortable, not prone to extremes and makes life feel safe. The opposite of the climate crisis afflicting the real world, I guess. 

So I have that. It's a lot. I got extremely lucky when I met Jeff. He'd better know that. I was actually reluctant to marry him at first. Not because I had any misgivings about Jeff. I didn't. I had misgivings about me. 

It always seems to rain on my parties. So I figured a marriage would just end in a stormy disaster, just like so much of life does.

I thankfully found the courage to run my life without worrying about the "weather" so much. Jeff gently encouraged that. I made by far my life's best decision when I popped the question. That yes I got meant the world to me, and still does. Even more so than it did a decade ago. 

It turned out the marriage did not lead to more storms, more gloom in life. Over the past decade, Jeff has slowly made progress in making me understand that life is partly sunny, not partly cloudy. 

When I was little, I was terrified of thunderstorms. Now, I love them. They're my favorite kind of weather.   Jeff is teaching me to understand that all of life's "thunderstorms" are not something to hide from or fear. but you learn from them. Problems might be a pain, but they're interesting.  I'll never love life's challenges, and I'll always whine about them but Jeff is making me realize when you face storms together, you win.  

 Thanks to Jeff, it's been wall to wall sunshine through a decade of marriage.  Just like the weather will be today during our celebratory outdoor garden party. 

I think today's weather forecast is a good omen for Jeff and me. I love you so much, Chief!