Whether Weather? Which is Right?

I'm a bit of a nutcase. I'm super-highly sensitive to the weather. I'm horrendously phobic about housework and cleaning. I need just the right light and weather to clean my house. The sky must be clear and blue. I need the bright cheery weather to cheer me on.

Last week, when I checked the forecast app on my phone, I saw predictions of perfect pre-Pesach (pre-Passover) cleaning weather, even for my nutty standards. But this morning, when I looked at the sky, at what photographers call "Blue Hour," all I saw was a yellowy grey. I got gypped.

Could this be some temporary aberration?

Sitting at the computer, the view was even worse, and it wasn't just the dirty window panes.

So I checked the phone's weather app again.

IMHO that's a forecast for almost ideal weather.

There's another weather site on my computer, which is also calibrated to Shiloh, so I checked that one.

It predicts a different scenario. Which weather forecast is the correct one?

Adding to my mounting panic is that yellowy tinge I see in the sky. It's a clear sign of desert dust storms. That's a weather phenomenon we never experienced on Long Island.

During our first spring in Israel I learned about dust storms and sandstorms, when the clean wet laundry morphed into awful, sandy yellow dirty laundry after hanging outside on dry but yellow days. Days like today.

If I'm forecasting correctly, from the color of the sky, this may be a very difficult and challenging week to clean the house. Spring cleaning must be done when I can safely open up the windows and hang out lots of laundry. True Passover, Pesach cleaning can still be done. I don't need the outdoors all that much to clean the refrigerator, just good music.

So, now I must motivate myself, recalibrate to plan my pre-Pesach cleaning differently. And that also means that non-kitchen, non-chametz cleaning must be after Passover, when the skies are clear and dust-free.

B"H, Blue Sky Has Returned!

actual color, not sepia
photo taken early in the dust-storm 

Israel generally has the most boring summer (from April to October, sometimes interrupted in May-June by a couple of short desert sandstorms) weather which varies between hot and hotter, and the sky stays sky blue for months on end, but this year was different. For the last week or two we've been suffering from a long, almost never-ending unseasonable and unprecedented sandstorm.

For those with all sorts of health problems, especially connected to lungs, like asthma, this has been very trying times and dangerous, too. The only thing to do was to stay in air-conditioned buildings and keep all windows closed. Even awful housekeepers like myself have been continuously dusting. The fine sand has even snuck into closets and no doubt lungs, too. And for those of us who hang our laundry outside to dry, this has been a time of minimal clothes-washing, because wet clothes particularly attract the dust and sand.

I was going to do a lot of wash yesterday, as I usually do on Tzom Gedalia while fasting and staying home, but the air was still pretty dirty, although the forecasters had been predicting that it would end for days if not longer. I had decided that dust, sand or not, I had no choice but to launder today, even if it meant hanging laundry to dry all over the house.

But miracle of miracle, finally this morning the sky is clear and blue!! Thank Gd!!!!