Some research.

(WARNING- the following blog entry is completely focused on weather. It may be extremely boring to portions of the population. If you find yourself distracted, yawning repeatedly, or slipping in and out of consciousness, while reading this post then close the webpage immediately. Visit it again later in the week only when a new, more stimulating, entry will likely have been posted.
You have been warned.)

Okay, so upon making the decision to move to Portland, Oregon, we suddenly found ourselves with a heightened awareness of climate. And the recievers of many, many, words of advice and warnings.

"You know it rains there, right?"

"Do you know how much rain they get up there?"

"Man, I don't think I could handle the rain in that place."

"I sure couldn't live without sun, dude."


As you all know , our heads swirling with visions of constant floods and neverending monotonous gray skies we still went ahead and relocated to the Northwest.

I'm happy to report that so far it really hasn't been that terrible. Oh sure it's rained a lot but honestly no more than the folks in the Bay Area have been receiving. And in fact the storms have been on a much milder scale than our Southern friends have been enduring.

It got me thinking. Maybe it's really been a big conspiracy up here, this whole "oh man it rains all the time" stuff. A clever ploy to keep the outsiders out. Scare off the Californians, Canadians, and other foreigners who might want to ravage and spoil this idyllic Pacific paradise.

So I did research (maybe about 10 minutes on the internet.) I fully expected to uncover a terrible misconception about the state of Oregon and put into swing a full scale migration of friends and family to the Pacific coast. People from all over moving to the new "sun state" of the West.

Well, what I discovered was that the misconception maybe isn't such a misconception after all. Looking at annual precipitation numbers there are some pretty glaring differences between Portland and the rest of North America for weather. Especially those regions known as "California."

Here's how the numbers stack up for annual precipitation in some familiar spots across the continent:

Portland- 36"
San Francisco- 22"
Los Angeles- 16"
Toronto- 32"
St. Paul/Minneapolis- 29"
Seattle- 37"
Vancouver- 43"

So, yeah, it does rain a lot here. Oregon isn't quite the undiscovered sun country I thought it might be. It is mostly grey and wet for a good chunk of the year.

But honestly it hasn't really bothered me. I admit I do think about weather more than I have in a decade, but it's not so bad.

I mean it doesn't really snow here or anything eh.