Hurricane Earl. Finland is slightly east-northeast of here. 4500 miles, to be exact.
I lied. We didn’t have to do anything. See, we don’t get hurricanes over here. Sometimes we get a few bad thunderstorms, and sometimes it rains a lot, and sometimes a smallish tornado will throw a horse and dog across a field and it will make headlines all over the country, but no hurricanes. Not even small ones. And if one would get lost on its way to somewhere else, it would die before it reached Finland.
We simply don’t have what it takes to create a hurricane, or a tropical storm, as they are also called by people who know what they’re talking about. We don’t have enough tropics. We don’t have enough water. And even if we did, the water is not warm enough. And we definitely don’t have enough badly built houses below sea level behind questionable levees.
I can’t tell you I’m not happy about it. I don’t like windy weather. It makes it hard to pedal my bike up the hill to my apartment and my hair gets all messed up, and I just brushed it a week ago! I like my windows intact and my trees rooted to the ground. But maybe I would be better off we had Hurricane Season.
I’m a big wuss when it comes to all sorts of extreme weather. I already told you that we don’t have hurricanes, but we don’t have volcanoes, earthquakes or droughts either. Hell, we barely have sunshine! Sometimes we get a little flooding, but we’re no Pakistan. Or even the Czech Republic. We’re the Switzerland of weather, and it has made me a big chicken. I will never be able to move anywhere because holy fuck, what if there’s an earthquake? This has led me to realize that being born in Finland has severely limited my life. I’ll be stuck here forever, enjoying my safe and boring weather. So thanks Mom and Dad for keeping me sheltered from every single scary thing I could have possibly experienced. Really. Thanks a lot. *
