Every Friday is 11 Things day at Living Behind the Curve.

Bleh. I don’t know about you, but I’m smack dab in the middle of the mid-atlantic region, and we’re currently bitching and moaning our way through our yearly heat wave. I don’t know why Pennsylvanians complain about the weather, because we get everyone’s weather that nobody wants. Besides, this year is downright mild, and a pleasant change from all the global warming doom and gloom we were all subjected to last year. So, in a fit of pique (and possibly heat stroke), I bring you the 11 Places Pennsylvania Steals It’s Weather From And How We Like To Bitch About It.

1. Ahh, January in Mongolia. Dry, windy, cold, and bleak. Everyone has to suck it up and go back to work to pay for all the crap they had to buy over the holidays. We ate too much, we drank too much, and our therapists are in Aruba.The monthly bitch for January is the complete lack of snow days that might break up the suffering.

2. Pennsylvania isn’t prone to a whole lot of snow in it’s populated regions, but if you’re gunna get it, it’ll be in February — welcome to Saskatchewan’s Southern Extention! We like to bitch about all the morons who run out and empty the stores of bread and milk if the weatherman so much as suggests a flurry this time of year.

3. March is a little harder to classify, so I picked Las Vegas, because it’s a complete gamble what you’re going to get. In the same month, you can get a week of rain, a blizzard, and 80 degree days. Most people just pick whatever season it is that day and bitch about that not being the season they wanted.

4. Ahh, April in Paris, where it’s overcast, gloomy, colder than you expect, and damp. We don’t see the sun much this month, so we’re prone to bitching about developing personal cases of mildew.

5. A favorite activity of mine in May is speculating just what happened to cause the street runoff to turn precisely that ferocious color. May is like the rainy season in Mumbai, warm and wet and relentless, and just in time for Pennsylvanians to bitch about their basements flooding, like they do every year.

6. Summer really starts kicking into gear in July, when everyone’s lawn starts to resemble the Serengeti. It’s hot and dry, except when it isn’t. We get spectacular thunderstorms in July, and when people aren’t bitching about the heat, they’re bitching about the hail hammering their car outside.

7. August is just plain unpleasant. The days get shorter, so you can’t enjoy a cool evening for quite as long as you could before — if you can find one, that is. It’s as if we’re stuck in a Costa Rican rain forest. The skeeters start flying in formation, the air becomes hazy and dense, and you can see the molds and fungi growing before your eyes. Predictably, the entire state sighs as one, declaring in one collective bitch, “It’s not the heat, it’s this humidity!” And then everyone coughs or sneezes, because whatever it is you’re allergic to just bloomed, rotted or sprouted while you were bitching.

8. I’ve heard from a variety of sources that the only reason to live in Los Angeles is because the weather is nice. It gets kinda like that here in September. Everything clears up, the evenings cool off a bit, and the days are usually, if not pleasant, then in the same neighborhood. Since the weather is fairly nice, and the summer vacations are pretty much over, and the kids are back in school, we Pennsylvanians give up bitching about the weather and bitch about the traffic instead.

9. October brings on fall proper, and leaf peeping season starts right abou- oh, sorry, you missed it. It’s not exactly pretty in Pennsylvania in the fall, as the trees can never get their acts together to all turn at the same time, and we’re just as likely to see them rot on the limbs as anything. It just sort of turns desolate and windy. I find it rather distinctive, so I’m going to cheat and say that Pennsylvania just looks like Pennsylvania in October. This time of year, we don’t bitch so much about all the leaves we have to rake. We bitch at a more advanced level, about how the tree in the front yard is the first to drop leaves, the last, or the slowest. It’s always going to be one or the other, you just watch.

10. November is overcast, cold, and rainy. London is looking over the pond and going “eeeyeah, not on a bet”. Miserable, drippy weather sends everyone fleeing, oddly enough, to the bar. Right about now is when we start bitching how the weather is affecting the Steelers or Eagles defensive line, because it can’t just be simple incompetence, right?

11. Finally, the merry old month of December descends upon us all with a sickening crash. Whatever you do, don’t hold your breath for a White Christmas; just get down on your knees and pray to whatever gods you happen to be friendly with that there won’t be a freak ice storm that shuts down the airport the day you’re scheduled to visit the relatives you don’t even like. You haven’t seen the sun in weeks, you’re the only moron who hasn’t taken the last two weeks off at the end of the year, and an overload of debt and muzak versions of Sleigh Ride has rendered your family and friends permanently hostile. December bitching is like no other, ultimately revolving around the theme that if your family truly loved you, they’d never make you leave the house and drive these godforsaken roads and just reschedule the holidays to a more humane time of year. Just like I imagine those who live in Siberia do, your only chance at survival is to curl up in bed with a nice fluffy blanket and a large bottle of vodka and try to quietly wait it out till New Years.

Alright, folks, try to stay cool this weekend, and enjoy yourselves!