Today's Forecast: Missing My Dad

My dad loved the weather. Growing up in a poor sharecropper family, keeping an eye on the weather was crucial. But his interest went far beyond that. After he died in 1996, we unearthed a 5-year diary he had kept during his days as a WWII Navy Seabee and the surrounding years. Each day probably had 4-6 sentences about what happened that day.

Every single day he recorded the weather for that day.

He was the first of his family to go to college, a privilege only made possible by the Navy. As a Seabee, it makes sense that he became a mechanical engineer, but I always wondered if he secretly wished to be a meteorologist.

Each year he cut the Hurricane Tracking Chart out of the paper and plotted whatever storms threatened or came into the Gulf. One of his all-time favorite gifts was the cross-stitched tracking chart I made and framed for him.

We have old 8mm home movies of the early stages of Hurricane Carla moving into Galveston in September 1961. I was barely a month old, but he drove with the rest of the kids the hour to Galveston to watch it. He was so utterly cautious and conservative in every other aspect of his life that it still amazes me that he did that.

And last September, I joked that he was on the front row of heaven (and probably asked God to time it as such) when my mom died the morning Hurricane Ike hit the Texas coast!

(The first Thanksgiving and Christmas after he died didn't bother me too much. The first hurricane season? Caught me totally off-guard and blew me away! Pun intended!)

And while I'm not as avid as my dad, I do like weather. The extremes are fascinating, and it's an incredible display of God's power.

So of course I had to document the last half of this scorching, sweltering, searing month that is finally coming to a close.

Austin High Temperatures, June 2009

June 13 - 100
June 14 - 100
June 15 - 101
June 16 - 101
June 17 - 100
June 18 - 100
June 19 - 97
June 20 - 102
June 21 - 101
June 22 - 101
June 23 - 103
June 24 - 105
June 25 - 106
June 26 - 105
June 27 - 105
June 28 - 103
June 29 - 106

I don't know what caused the "cold front" on the 19th; it's not like we got a single drop of rain the entire month! Although I do hear some rumbles off in the distance this morning. One can only hope. I better check the radar.

I am my daddy's girl!

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