So a meteorologist walks into a bar near Lake Superior … and the kind of weather we have around here could certainly drive a meteorologist to drink.

Or it could drive weather lovers to toast this wonderful region where, as the saying goes, if you don’t like current conditions, wait five minutes and the weather will change.

We Up Northers do love our atmospheric variability. We talk about it daily, often with strangers. Like this conversation our magazine adviser Donn Larson might have had with a tourist.

Visitor: What do you do in the summer around here?

Donn: Well, if it comes on Sunday, we play baseball.

That plays right into what Cap’t Tom Mackay was saying: We have two seasons by Lake Superior - nine months of winter followed by three months of tourists.

Another way to look at our climate comes from our own maritime author-historian Fred Stonehouse: Summer? Six weeks of poor sledding.

“In Marquette,” Fred confides, “we look at Lake Superior as just being the ‘iced’ Caribbean.”

Of course, when looking for jokes related to the weather - which is exactly what I asked these friends around the lake to send - former port director Davis Helberg always has a good zinger or three. Here are the three he sent:

“Thirty below zero is God’s answer to mosquito control.”

“I know it’s pretty rough down at the port when I see whitecaps on my birdbath in Esko.”

And this quip (a favorite of mine that you might remember from one of Davis’ columns in this magazine): “I was at the ship canal one day when the wind off the lake was so strong that I saw one sea gull lay the same egg three times.”

Ow … which reminds me, “oeuf” is French for egg; “uff da” is Scandahovian for “that’s quite some painful egg joke.”

Apparently weather humor runs in the Helberg family. Davis says that in the mid-1990s when Duluth’s thermometers plunged to a record minus 40° - not windchill, just temperature - his son Adam called to ask, “Hey, Dad, got any mercury over there? I’m all out.”

So why am I bugging humor-savvy friends for weather jokes? I’m hoarding them for the coming season - seasons - in case I need to laugh about the questionable days.

Do not doubt that questionable days are coming, days when stepping outside puts the joke on us.

Take this September-October-November time (please). Its hourly season changes make clothing choices dicey.

You dress for late summer in the warm morning and your fingers freeze to the steering wheel by noon.

Or you layer on the late fall blouse-sweater-vest combo only to discover that the last leftover shard of summer sun has risen in the sky, leaving you stuck between too hot in all this stuff and too northern shy to do a Gypsy Rose Lee in the office.

Besides weather jokes, this issue is packed with ideas and anticipation of seasons that are on the way - some in the next minute or so.

The North Woods - our fall fashion model in this issue’s photo feature - is nothing less than drop-dead gorgeous with its vibrant colors reflected off our sparkling river, pond, lake waters. It makes you long for that season between “Sunday baseball” and “iced Caribbean.”

The winter recreation stories almost - almost, mind you - make you want to hurry through autumn to the scene-changing white stuff that paves the way for snowshoes, skis, snowmobiling and a break from tending the weed garden (okay, that may be just me).

Thanks to a question from a storm-loving reader, regional weather gurus will tell you how to anticipate Lake Superior’s most powerful mood shifts from October through December and again in spring. You can track storms on Lake Superior on the Internet or telephone using the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s weather buoys. Read about it in Travel & Events.

Finally, we honor a “man for all seasons” in announcing this year’s Achievement Award winner - a person whose work has helped to clean regional waters for us and future generations.

And that, my friends, is no joke.

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