I grew up in Arizona, where the weather was constant sunshine for around 300 days out of the year. You had rain and even snow—although no one I talk to believes that snow could fall in the desert. However, precipitation was more of an anomaly than a regular thing most times.

I find myself thinking about the Arizona weather lately as Wisconsin has gone through wacky weather patterns that have people complaining about the outside environment more than usual. It’s not your standard rain and snow but extreme conditions that make you wonder if Mother Nature has just stopped taking her valium entirely and needs a Silver Alert called on her.

Last month in Wisconsin, meteorologists warned us that we were going to get one or two feet of snow, which tends to be unusual in itself, as we tend to get a few inches out of each winter storm. However, most of us were quite surprised that the two-day blizzard wound up dumping 33 inches of snow, especially since some of the days leading up to the storm were in the lower 60s.

It was unreal how my apartment complex did two rounds of clearing out snow that Sunday, the first day of the storm, and then did not touch the parking lot again until four days later, when warmer temperatures were melting the snow. It was like everyone decided that anything after the first day was not worth touching, and if we died, we died.

I had survived one other big snowstorm eight years earlier. This one took place in mid-April, just when we thought we’d left winter far behind, and before we could say “April showers bring May flowers,” we were buried under 30 inches of snow. That one was fun to get out of.

Remembering that unpleasant weather phenomenon, it seems that Mother Nature was at some intergalactic bar with Father Time, Sister Mary Clarence and any other imaginary people you claim, and she said, “Hold my beer” as she topped the previous snowstorm.

She wasn’t done there, though. Not by a long shot.

Just as the snow piles were starting to recede and giving us hope that things were only going to get better from here, hormonal surging from Mother Nature prompted her to give us an ice storm of epic proportions. Ice storms are not too common, but just often enough, we get one and realize we need to stay home, as even a thin glaze of ice could cause us to go skidding off roads.

When temperatures hover around freezing, we usually get snow. However, sometimes weather conditions produce freezing rain, where rain hits the pavement and freezes. Where I live, we got whammied but good with a half-inch of ice. Schools were closed again. Vehicle crashes were piling up. The only good news is that the ice quickly melted and didn’t leave us all stranded for days.

Of course, we hadn’t faced Mother Nature’s full wrath yet. The temperatures were getting warmer, which meant reduced chances for snow and ice.

Then came the floods.

The night before I wrote this, 70-degree weather stirred up some crazy thunderstorms that dropped almost 5 inches of rain here and in the surrounding communities. Normally in April, Wisconsin receives 3 inches of rain for the entire month. When you factor that one day earlier, we received almost 2 inches of rain from a daytime storm, we’ve received double the rain for the month, with more storms coming this week.

We got lucky that the rain has only pooled up around rivers and a couple of roads. Communities south of here had to cancel school because of heavier flooding. The schools turned into shelters for those who had to evacuate their homes because the waters were getting a little too close.

Blizzard. Ice storm. Floods. I get this creepy feeling that summer will be preempted by a swarm of locusts. It’s certainly understandable that I’ve been thinking about Arizona weather. Granted, the state is still in a long-term drought, but until we can figure out how to haul all the precipitation Mother Nature has dropped on us in the last 30 days across the country, we seem to be stuck with her weather wackiness.