ONE day, Seattle? Seriously... One Day?!?

People say I was lucky to have grown up in California.

I always reply, 'It depends upon what part of California you grew up in.'

While I spent most of my childhood in Placerville, it was close enough to Sacramento to endure the same weather patterns. In essence, there were two seasons in Sacramento: 'miserably hot', and 'tar-boiling, tennis shoe-melting, fry-an-egg-on-your-dashboard' kind of hot. Either way, it made me appreciate those occasional days when the sun was covered by clouds and rain fell in little droplets, and I decided that when I was old enough to be on my own, I would be moving to a climate that was not so relentlessly sunny; I actually pined for rainy days, for fog and sleet and occasionally the driving snow.

I'm about to change my mind on that now.

It's friggin' April- no, it's the end of April, with May speeding around the corner like a pollen-belching locomotive. Only thing is, this particular train is being pulled by 'The Little Engine That Couldn't', and each day we awake to that same, dismal grayness, where the clouds cover the sun with bellies full of rain.

Seriously, the last time Salome and I saw the sun for any extended period of time, it was when we took our belated honeymoon trip to Cancun last summer. And even then, we had a hurricane (Dean) bearing down on us. But even still, we were grateful.

In the last 30 days, we've had two- count 'em, two- days where the sun broke the back of the relentless clouds, and finally showed its face for all of 16 hours- the slutty little tease- and so now California is looking better and better.

True, the relentless sun that beats down upon that state puts you at an increased risk for melanoma, but no one (as far as I know) ever suffered from Seasonal Affective Disorder by living in sunshine.

Talk about only ever seeing things in shades of gray.