I get a kick out of people who are unhappily surprised by June's miserable weather - every year.

Year after year.

After year.

Here's reality, folks: this is the Wet Coast of Canada.

The average annual rainfall here would give Noah pause for thought.

The rainy season here begins and ends in August - it begins at the end of August, and ends at the beginning of August.

With a few showers in between.

Sometimes there are sunny days in July.

And June is one of our wet months.

June on the Wet Coast is simply a miserable month for sun worshippers, beach goers, David Duchovny, and generally anyone who cannot muster the genetic predisposition to grow gills.

Likewise anyone for whom the smell of water doesn't cause webs to develop between fingers and toes.

If you do not like copious amounts of free, sky-delivered water, you don't belong in this place.

Quit complaining and divert your energies to finding another, more suitable place to hang your raincoat.

Perhaps you can find a place with hurricanes or tornadoes, instead.

Or maybe a warm, sunny place where you're not allowed to take showers of greater than 30 seconds' duration.

A place where you can revel in the sun and the heat.

And your sweat. Personally, I'm not all that averse to the cool, refreshingly damp breezes that save me the trouble of washing my jacket too often.

Yes, there's the odd mud splatter - a standard hazard in these parts - but it just rinses off, eventually.

Of course, I grew up in Port Alberni, where the average annual rainfall is actually between two and three times that of the Fraser Valley.

Believe it or not! And many, many (many!) years ago, I even considered taking a job in a once-upon-a-time pulp mill in a place called Ocean Falls, literally one of the wettest places on the planet, dubbed the "Home of the Rain People."

Seriously! The handful of people who still tread water there actually brag about how much rain they get in a year!

Their town slogan is, "Where the waters of the sky meet the waters of the sea."

And they aren't kidding! I've heard tell that a particularly high tide is sometimes misidentified as an unusually heavy rainstorm.

We can put this in perspective with a quick review of numbers.

In this part of the Fraser Valley, we can expect an average annual rainfall of 850 millimetres - which is about 35 inches (or just shy of three feet) for the elderly and the metricimpaired. Admittedly, much of it falls in June - which is never a great way to start a summer.

You may understand why someone like me may consider this relatively dry, when you consider that my formative years on Vancouver Island were greeted with annual drenchings of about (officially) 1,797 mm - about 71 inches, or somewhat over the top of the head of a slightly taller-than-average man.

The average rainfall in Ocean Falls is 4,390 mm - a whopping 14 and a half feet!

OK, I admit I didn't take the Ocean Falls job, lo those many years ago - but quit complaining about our few drops of rain in June here, will ya?

- Bob Groeneveld is the editor of our sister paper, the Langley Advance.