Somebody has to do something about the weather here. After going through my full share of German bureaucracy, I’m probably not the best person, but somebody should take on the task.

I wander out to the street yesterday to be greeted by a beautiful spring morning. The birds were chirping, the … uh … fish were … eh … singing (?), the other animals were doing whatever the other animals do when its springtime. (I’m living in a city, dang it — and the animals here are different from back home. I don’t have the time to find out what they’re up to. (Oh, and though I’ve found out this might not be true, I’ve been told that squirrels don’t live in Germany. I haven’t been able to find out if they disappeared in some strange varient of the Pied Piper tale, or if there’s a Germany equivalent of St. Patrick who had it in for bushy tailed rodents.))

Today we’re back to weather-courtesy-of-Noah, a steady, drizzly, downpourish-type rain that simply will not let up. I’m beginning to get worried, since I don’t even know what the German word for “ark” is.

It’s not really the water that bother me, though. Hamburg’s a port city (founding member of the Hanseatic League, you know) (you did not), so I came here expecting some wetness. The inability of the German weather gods to make up their minds, though, that’s irritating. This place has the most changeable weather I’ve ever seen.

I got my first glimpse of that when I got off the plane here in December. While walking to the hostel I was staying at for the first few days, I trudged through rain, snow, sleet and hail, as well as various permutations of precipitation. Once I got to the place, I started handing out letters to random people, figuring I must be a contestant on some sort of U.S. Postal Service-themed reality show.

Since then, I’ve lived through hail storms pounding out of clear blue sky, temperatures that rise and drop like bungee-cord-afficionados and rain showers that appear and disappear at will.

The only good think about the local weather patterns is they’ve clued me in to a new way of measuring the cold: using my glasses. My eyeglasses make a strange clicking or cracking noise when they get cold, with the time between going outside and hearing the noise enabling me to figure out exactly what the temperature is. Sure, I could look at a thermometer, but they’re all in Centigrade: Graphing elapsed-glass-clicking time is much easier than trying to convert to Fahrenheit.

Of course, cracking sounds coming from eyeglasses isn’t the most soothing sound one can hear. No doubt the next snow storm that descends upon me will result in a much more hideous crackling sound, followed by my glasses making a spectacle of themselves as they split into component parts.

When I end up not only wandering around in rotten weather but also blind, than I’ll really have something to complain about.