Unofficial start of spring means winter of discontent nearly over

Today marks the unofficial start of spring.

It's the start of daylight saving time, when nature begins to heal itself by allowing us to have sunlight in the evening. If you see your shadow after 5:30 p.m., it means that there are fewer than six weeks of winter left. (It's possible I've mixed up winter-focused "holidays." It's also possible that whether or not a groundhog sees a shadow on Feb. 2, there are always six weeks of winter left because Feb. 2 is 6½ weeks before the first day of spring. So yeah, there's always six weeks of winter left on Feb. 2.)

Today's shift to daylight saving time seems more dramatic than normal because we've had the most wintery winter in memory. In Solano County and the rest of Northern California (heck, the rest of California and the rest of the West Coast , this has been a winter to remember. Or forget. It's been day after day after day of either cold or rainy weather. Or both. Snow on Mount Vaca and Twin Sisters? Flooding? We've had both.

Recent winters have been different. Virtually every year in the past decade or two, we've had at least a week or two (maybe even a month) of spring-like weather in January or February. We've had days when there was no need for a jacket when you went outside in mid-winter. We've been able to wear shorts in February.

This year? I don't think I've gone in shirtsleeves (the old-timey way of saying without a jacket) since before Halloween. Most mornings, I've either had to dodge raindrops while going to my car for work or scrape ice off the windshield. By the way, the cold, wintery weather is compounded when you have an old car that allows rainwater in. The result? An overworked defroster and a few mornings with ice on the inside of my back window. But I digress, because it ends today.

Today starts daylight saving time. Today spring is here.

Pay no attention to the weather forecast. Sure, we might get rain. It might still be cold. It might be snowing in Tahoe and flooding along the Russian River, as far as I know. We might keep getting variations of the "Pineapple Express" storms from Hawaii (the best weather-related name, for what it's worth).

But it's springtime. Before long, we'll have warm, sunny (windy) days. We'll open our windows to let in fresh air. We'll have to turn on the air conditioner.

The effects of the winter of our discontent will continue, whether good (reservoirs full, good snowpack) or bad (more ticks, lawns growing too fast). But the start of daylight saving time means that we're unofficially starting spring.

Now if someone can inform the weather, it would be good. If the rainy, cold and/or generally miserable conditions continue, we might all go mad.

I'm not sure I can continue to scrape ice off my inside back window and use a towel to dry the inside of my windshield much longer. Fortunately, I won't.

Daylight saving time is here!

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.