Rain, rain, rain making it a very strange summer in Georgia

Summer seems to have become very strange.

When I call up the local weather forecast on my iPhone, it shows rain for every day in the five-day forecast. It doesn't usually rain in the mornings, but the afternoons and evenings have been wet for most of the last two weeks. When we moved here, they were talking about a drought.

For a while we were invaded by millipedes, which are so small -- and reportedly so flexible -- that they can come into the house through the walls. At least that's what the exterminator told us when he came out for a command performance.

Not rainy, but pretty light for 9:15 p.m.

All the bugs and all the precipitation definitely made me nostalgically recall my two summers in Colorado in 1987 and '88.

I think weather-wise, the Front Range was the best place I ever lived. Four real seasons, and none of them really unpleasant. I remember in 1987 we got our last snowfall in early April, and then there was no rain or snow at all for six months.

The summers were great in two respects. Temperatures reached the 90s in the daytime, but the humidity was so low it seemed 10 degrees cooler. Then once the sun went down, the nighttime low was around 50. My apartment had air conditioning, but I never once turned it on in two years.

One thing has seemed very strange to me lately. The sun sets, but then it doesn't really get dark until 9:30 or so. That surprised me at first, because we are farther south than Los Angeles. We don't get the "midnight sun" effect of cities far to the north. When Nicole and I were in Amsterdam two summers ago, it was still light out at 10:30.

What's happening here is that Georgia is affected by the way the east coast bends inward as you head south from Virginia. We live in a state that borders on the Atlantic Ocean, but we are almost due south of Cincinnati, Ohio. If I were to get into my car and drive west, it would take me less than an hour to reach Alabama and the beginning of the Central Time Zone.

We're in the same time zone as Portland, Me., but we are 14 degrees longitude farther west. So the sun rises later and sets later than in most of the other cities on Eastern Daylight Time.

Theoretically, if it weren't raining so much, I could go out to play golf after dinner and still get in 18 holes before dark. Now that's weird.

Someday the rain will stop.

I really don't want to build an ark.