Part of the climate in the Pacific Northwest - and plenty of other regions as well - involves an oscillation of cold and warm weather throughout spring, an intermediate for winter transitioning into summer. That transition though seems jerkier and jankier every year, like a car's failing transmission steadily getting worse, with the gears grinding ever more tortuously through a shift.
You have the remnants of your winter storms coming and going throughout the spring, a little warmer and a little more subdued than they were in the winter. But then when the sun comes out, it feels hot and intense like it does in the summer, much more suddenly. The flora and fauna seem to think so too. You get this, "oh shit we gotta get going!" The bugs are out and getting busy and the flower buds are popping, and then, all of a sudden the temperature plummets again and you're back to late winter/early spring, and everything gets the signal that it's not quite time, and to go dormant again, but then not long after that hot sun is back and blazing again.
What was before a more gradual warming has become an abrupt and almost rude imposition of the summer, earlier and earlier. Evidence of an increasingly imperial summer.
