Groundhog Forecasts 18 More Weeks of Suckiness for Bend

According to German folklore, if a hibernating groundhog pops out of his burrow on Feb. 2 and sees his shadow, he'll go back inside his burrow and winter will last six more weeks. If he doesn't see his shadow, there will be an early spring.

We in Bend always get a laugh out of the Groundhog Day tradition, because no matter what the frickin' groundhog does on Feb. 2 we KNOW the weather here is going to stay sucky until the middle of June.

Nevertheless, for the record, let it be stated that Punxsutawney Phil emerged from his burrow on Gobbler's Knob in Punxsutawney, PA this morning and saw his shadow, meaning the rest of the Northern Hemisphere will have six more weeks of winter.

Seven Days of Sunshine, 24 Days of Suck

The Sunshine Count for the first month of 2010 is in. By Blackdog's unscientific, but fair, reckoning, there were seven days of sunshine -- i.e., days on which the sun shone most of the time -- in January. On the other 24 days, Bend was its usual gray, gloomy, dreary, dismal, drizzly self.

The first and last days of January were nearly cloudless. In between were scattered five days that I considered sunny enough to count as "days of sunshine." I was being generous on two or three of them.

Bend needs to rack up a total of only 66 non-sunny days to give the lie to the absurd "300 days of sunshine" claim, and it's more than a third of the way there already. I'm betting it will hit the mark by the end of March.

January Totals:

Days of Sun: 7
Days of Suckiness: 24

YTD Totals:

Days of Sun: 7
Days of Suckiness: 24

The Ballad of Sucky Bend

Just about twenty-five years ago

I set out on the road

Thought I’d found a paradise

At least that’s what I was told.

Things got bad, things got worse,

I guess you know the tune.

Oh Lord, fog-fucked in Bend again.

Rode in on Highway 97

I didn’t have a clue

Just how hard this place could suck

My hopes and dreams fell through

Ran out of time and money

This never was my plan

Oh Lord, fog-fucked in Bend again.

If I had a dollar

For every sucky day

I’d buy a ticket outta here

And give my house away.

You know I’d catch the next plane

To someplace where it don’t rain

Oh Lord, fog-fucked in Bend again.

-- with apologies to Creedence

Is Bend Getting Suckier?

Maybe it's global climate change or maybe it's just that I'm becoming an old fart, but it seems to me that Bend's climate is getting suckier as the years go by.

I remember the winters when I moved here more than 20 years ago being much colder and snowier, but also a lot sunnier. A storm would blow in, dump a foot or two of snow and move out, leaving a sparkling landscape of pristine white under dazzling blue skies.

No more. The pattern we seem to get these days is week after week of gray, dismal weather, interspersed with those sucktacular INVERSIONS (four already this winter, by my count).

If this is the way it's gonna be I might as well move to Portland. At least it's warmer there, they don't get fog-fucked, and spring arrives in March -- not late June.

Fog-Fucked in Sucky Bend Again

Bend is socked in with yet another episode of freezing fog -- the fourth this year, by my count, and winter has barely begun.

This morning I was commiserating with a young local musician about the Bend freezing fog phenomenon. He told me he had his own special descriptive term for it.

"Let me see if I can guess," I said. "It's a four-letter word that begins with S and it isn't 'soup.'"

"Nope," he said. "I call it 'being fog-fucked.'"

Fog-fucked. I like it. Kind of sums up life in freezing, foggy, sucky, fucked-up Bend.

So Just How Sucky IS It?

Everybody who knows anything about the Bend climate knows that the claim of 300 days of sunshine a year is pure 200-proof, double-distilled bullshit. But how many days of sunshine a year does Bend really have?

First we have to start by defining what we mean by "a day of sunshine." To me, and I believe to most people, the phrase "a day of sunshine" means a day in which the sun shines all or most of the time -- not a day when it peeps feebly out from behind the clouds for 30 minutes, or 30 seconds.

By the common and sensible standard, I'd guess that Bend doesn't experience even half the 300 days of sunshine the local boosters claim. And I'm going to put that to the test.

Starting today (New Year's Day 2010) I'm going to mark a big "S" on my calendar for every day that I regard as a "day of sunshine." I don't have any fancy high-tech equipment to measure the solar brightness or duration; I'll just be using my own eyeballs. But I will make every effort to be fair. If the sun is out for more than half the daytime hours, I'll mark that day as sunshiney.

I'll report back at the end of each month, and on the first day of 2011 I'll announce the total for the year. The results might not be scientific, strictly speaking, but they'll be at least as scientific as the "300 days of sunshine" claim, whose basis I never have been able to discover.

It's SAD (Sucky Affective Disorder) Season

When Hell freezes over ...
... it'll be just like Bend.

Seasonal Affective Disorder (or Sucky Affective Disorder, as I like to call the Bend version) afflicts millions of people in the United States during the gray, gloomy, dark months of winter, causing depression that can be severe enough to trigger suicide. The grayer and gloomier and darker conditions are, the more likely people are to develop SAD. (It's estimated that as much as 8% of the population of Alaska gets it.)

If you're prone to SAD, that's another excellent reason for NOT moving to Bend, Oregon.

First, there's the darkness. Bend sits at 44 degrees north latitude, which is almost halfway to the North Pole. That means in winter the days here are short -- not as short as Alaska's, but damn short. At this time of year the sun doesn't come up until about 8 and sets a little after 4. That's barely eight hours of daylight.

And then there's the grayness and gloominess. Chamber of Commerce bullshit about "300 days of sunshine a year" to the contrary notwithstanding, Bend is NOT sunny. It isn't even significantly sunnier than notoriously gray and drizzly Portland, as a look at the objective data shows.

Take a look at this chart from the city-data.com Web site tracking the amount of daily sunshine in Bend through the year. Notice that the dark green line representing Bend's sunshine is BELOW the national average almost all year. Only for a brief period in July and August does it creep above average. From mid-October to mid-March (six months a year) Bend is far less sunny than the national average.

Now contemplate this chart showing Portland's sunshine levels. Notice it's almost identical to Bend's.

How can Bend possibly be as gray and gloomy as Portland when Portland is so much rainier? The explanation is pretty simple: The storms that blow in from the Pacific dump their rain on Portland (and snow on the Cascades) so there isn't much moisture left in them when they get to Bend -- but Bend still gets the clouds.

And then there are our sucky INVERSIONS, which we have described at length earlier. Portland doesn't get them as a rule, so it's sunny there on many winter days when Bend is socked in with iron-gray skies and freezing fog.

If you develop SAD, of course, you have various options for handling it -- antidepressant drugs, light therapy, taking a vacation in Cabo or Palm Springs. But the best option is to avoid it by living someplace that doesn't suck as hard as Bend does.