With a Little Luck, We Will Weather El Nino Mentality

I’m pretty sure I’ve discovered the source of my water retention problems: It’s El Nino’s fault.

Then there is the string of bad hair days I have endured lately. I don’t like to name names, but the culprit’s initials are E. N., if you get my drift. I now realize the mild hearing loss in my right ear can’t possibly be a result of middle age.

In other words, none of the above can be blamed on me. It’s El Nino. It’s a better excuse than “The dog ate my homework.”

Why, this week alone, El Nino caused my plants to die, my dog to shed, and my keys to accidentally lock themselves inside my car twice. Those two times I was cranky to a family member--I just couldn’t help myself.

In Thousand Oaks last week, a big kahuna who does climate prediction for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego gave a lecture and used these momentous words: “El Nino will quite possibly be the event of the century in the eastern Pacific.”

Well. Excuse me, but where was he during the O.J. trial? The Heidi Fleiss crisis? Tonya and Nancy’s ice skating debacle? It’s going to take some pretty darned major weather catastrophes to overshadow those events.

We have been so inundated with dire Nino-esque predictions for so many months that each time we have another pleasant day in Ventura County, it’s a letdown. Call me a drama mama, but I’m worked up into such a disaster mind-set that only a calamity on the order of the Rodney King case will placate my blood thirst. Bring on the devastation! Show me some surf, dude. Of course, they were probably saying that in Pompeii the day before the lava began to ooze under the kitchen doors. “Bring on the lava,” they no doubt quipped ironically to each other (in Latin, of course).

Waiting so many months for the deluge can also have a numbing effect, like when stores put up Christmas decorations the day after Halloween. The meaning of the event ceases to penetrate: Familiarity breeds, if not contempt, a lack of focus. I become oblivious to “Silver Bells” the 23rd time it’s played on the grocery store Muzak. Even though I really liked it the first 22.

“El Neenyo, el smeenyo,” I said last week. I suppose the psychological term would be “desensitization.” I’ll have to consult my therapist. Besides, it’s hard to hold on to the gravity of a coming deluge when it’s 90 degrees in October and the Monarch butterflies have come back to Ventura in numbers we haven’t seen since the ‘80s.

Coincidence? I’ll leave it to the National Weather Service to make “calm before the storm” analogies.

And that’s probably when El Nino will hit--when we relax our vigilance, drop our guard and put our feet up on the plastic patio furniture. I mean, we have heard the same song 23 days in a row.

My mother has stopped watering her lawn in preparation for El Nino. I’ve used the rain gauge on our garage as a bird feeder all summer, but I’d better clean it out.

My husband has prepared for the future onslaught by dropping in on the local Doughboy outlet to buy a pair of what he calls “high-water pants.”

“Trust me. It’s going to be the fashion-forward style for men this winter. Especially in January,” he predicted.

A typical male, he is even more eager to drive in weather that will finally legitimize owning a four-wheel-drive Jeep in Ventura County. He is itching to shift into that unused gear. Sports utility vehicles are the automotive equivalent to high-water pants, I guess.

There is another, quieter weather story out there that only devoted weather nerds or feminists like myself have paid any attention to.

Although she gets less press and fewer klieg lights, La Nina is the female weather pattern, waiting patiently in the wings, as always, standing two steps behind the “Big El.” She gets blamed when the ocean gets chillier. Odds are she is the one who makes the coffee in the morning and gets up with the kids in the middle of the night. She settles for cheerleader tryouts instead of making the team. She is the little woman behind the man, and she is supposed to make a guest appearance next winter.

But come what may, we will deal with it as we have dealt with fire, flood, earthquakes and medflies in the past.

A couple of years ago, I went to the county’s Red Cross headquarters during one of our big floods or earthquakes, I forget which. Several Canadian Red Cross trainees had come to observe.

Why Ventura County? I asked one of them.

“Because you give such good disaster,” he said.