I give up. This New England weather has finally beaten me into submission.


It snowed last night. The last week of fricking March, and it snowed in Boston. These weren't flurries, either. No delicate gentle snowflakes, these. These were the wet, sticky, slappy sort of snowflakes. They thudded audibly against the windshield as I drove home from dinner. They may have dented the hood, even. This precipitation wasn't screwing around.


To be honest, the snow itself isn't the big problem here. I do have an issue, in principle, with seeing the white stuff this late in the year. 'April showers' should bring 'May flowers' -- not 'snow plowers', for crissakes. It's baseball season now, and there's no blizzards in baseball! So sure, the snow is troublesome.


Worse, though, are the wildly fluctuating temperatures. Last weekend, we had 'seasonal' weather, in the mid-fifties.* On Thursday, it was a warm and sunny near-seventy. Today -- thirty. There's no one on the planet, besides those equipped with a surname of Kennedy or Marcos, with a wardrobe wide enough to accomodate that sort of climatological claptrap.


I sure as hell don't, that's for certain. And I'm fed up with trying to outguess the weather monkeys over what to wear. From now on, I'm going to storm onto my porch in the morning, wearing short pants, a parka, and one galosh, and demand, 'WHAT? WHAT THE HELL'S THE RIGHT ANSWER TODAY?!?'


Some might say this week's wacky weather is simply proof of the old New England adage:


'If you don't like the weather now, just wait a bit. It'll change.'


Very cute and folksy, no doubt. I can readily imagine Grandpa Massachusetts in his rocker, with a Red Sox Nation shawl around his shoulders, dispensing such nuggets of wisdom to the wee ones gathered at his feet.


Except for one thing: that particular homey bit of fluff is true for ninety percent of the inhabitable land masses on the planet. Certainly, the weather's not going to change much in Antarctica or sub-Saharan Africa, no matter how long you wait around.


(For that matter, nothing much changes in Southern California weatherwise, either -- but there's no stupid adage in Southern California that starts with, 'If you don't like the weather...' If you don't like the weather there, they have you committed. Or ship you to Minnesota. Occasionally both.)


In the rest of the world, the weather changes. That's what scientists call 'seasons'. Seeeea-sons. My beef is simply this: if we only get four seasons, we shouldn't have to deal with three of them in the space of a week. The 'T-shirt and mittens' look is just dandy down at the sanitorium, but I'm not sure I should go to work that way.


Weather, you win. I'm putting on knee socks and a muumuu, and going back to bed. Somebody wake me when it's August, or even December. At least I'll know what the hell to wear outside.


(* The temperature tallies above are in Fahrenheit, obviously. I apologize to our friends across the pond. I'd convert to Celsius, really -- if only because it's a hell of a lot easier to spell -- but the math always ties me in knots.


'Take five-ninths of the number, add thirty-two, and subtract the barometric pressure expressed in milliliters of mercury on the third moon of Neptune,' or some such nonsense. I could never get it right. I'd have an easier time converting to Kelvin, and reporting how close we got to absolute zero today.)

Maybe it's time I started paying attention to the weather forecast.


Usually, I'm not so interested in what the meteorologists are blathering on about. If it rains, it rains. So I'll get a little wet going to the car -- big deal. If it's windy, it's windy. So my six dollar haircut looks a little more stupid than usual. Color me unfazed.


But this is the time of year, and one part of the world, when the climate from day to day gets a little more variable than may be comfortable. In the summertime, Boston is cozy. Warm, breezy, and occasionally downright balmy. In the spring, it's 'brisk'. And in wintertime, New England is cold. Damned cold, and snowy and gusty -- but predictably cold, and that's important.


In the fall... well, in the fall, New England weather does whatever the hell it wants to do, often in the space of an hour. Around October, Mother Nature is schizophrenic, unstable, and downright mean-spirited. And lately, that bitch has had my number.


If I wear short sleeves, it's forty degrees and windy like a filibustering Congressman.


If I adjust and put on long sleeves, the sun beats hot and heavy like a pair of pimply teens in the back of a Pontiac.


Wore a hat? Gale-force winds. Shoe untied? Flash floods and six inches of mud. Holes in my socks? I wouldn't be surprised at a plague of locusts, so the little bastards could wriggle in there and gnaw at my kneecaps. The raindrops just keep falling on my head.


I only see two options here. First -- and preferably -- I could simply stay in the house for a few weeks. By mid-November, I'll know it's going to be six stupid degrees outside, and I can wear fourteen layers of clothes and a heated jock strap, accordingly.


Of course, it's unlikely I'd be able to finagle a six-week sabbatical from work to escape the weather. I've used most of my sick days already, staying home to catch up on TiVo shows when the recorder fills up. And I'm saving up vacation days for a Boston-to-Brooklyn pub crawl in the spring. That's three weeks of fun and twelve years off my life, if I do it right. And a blood transfusion and criminal record, if I do it wrong. Either way, it's all good.


But in the meantime, I'm stuck with my climatological conundrum. So I've decided to beat Mother Nature at her own game. If the weather looks nasty, I'll go out in a parka and mukluks -- but when the sun heats up, as it inevitably will, I'll be ready. I'll strip out of the winter clothes to reveal shorts and a T-shirt underneath, and stay nice and cool. If she goes the other way, baiting me with warmth and sunshine, I'll go along with it -- but I'll stuff a sweatshirt and long johns down my pants, too, just in case.


Whatever it takes, I'll do it. I'll hide a poncho in my pocket, a windbreaker in my wallet, and a sport coat in my Speedos. That ought to get the ladies talking. Just don't ask where I'm stashing that emergency umbrella. Better to just assume that I'm 'happy to see you'.


With a wardrobe and a half on my person, I should be well prepared for any weather the world whips out. I may look pretty foolish in the morning, but when the weather turns in the afternoon, I'll be the one having the last laugh. Just as long as that umbrella doesn't accidentally open. That'd get the old mukluks in a bunch, for certain.