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WASHINGTON -- For many of us, winter technically ended last Friday, the last day of February. That's how the National Weather Service defines winter as the three months, December, January and February. So we're actually about a week into spring.Purists, a dwindling breed, cling to the vernal equinox, March 20, when day and night are of equal length, as the true beginning of spring.But others will adopt the second Sunday of March as the real start. Since last March that's the new time for the start of Daylight Saving. Admit it. You would have been blindsided just like last year. Daylight Saving means the endless days of summer even if, in large parts of the country, March can be a really nasty month.However it's measured, I for one am glad winter is over; not that I have anything against it, but I'm suffering from weather fatigue.In my city, Washington, D.C., the local TV stations are extremely competitive and are not above using the weather as a ratings builder. "Will we all drown like rats when a giant tsunami engulfs the capital? We'll have a full report at 11."Of late, it's not just going to maybe snow but, "There's a winter storm warning in effect." And it's not just going to rain tonight. No, "there's a flood watch in effect." Watch for what? Water rising around your ankles?Washingtonians are obsessed by snow because it brings the city to a halt. And it's infectious. They talk about "knowing how to drive in snow." That's a nice skill but an irrelevant one because the traffic doesn't move.Just south of Washington there is the brand new Springfield Interchange, a soaring spaghetti-like concrete confection of soaring ramps and lost motorists. It is one of the busiest interchanges in the country. So we had a little freezing rain and the $700 million interchange came to a total, gridlocked halt. People were trapped there three and four hours, some even longer.It turned out that Virginia had omitted proven anti-icing measures to save money. No one here was surprised or particularly outraged. We understand government.Thanks to the Internet, it's possible to follow the weather anywhere in the country. If your own weather doesn't alarm you, you can surf the weather radar sites until you find some place with weather that does. You don't even have to go to your computer. MSNBC has a segment called the "Worst Weather in the Country" so the viewers can relish other people's misery. Our relationship to the weather has been affected, and for the worse, by the whole debate over global warming. Climatology is an enormously complicated and still inexact science but that doesn't stop us from extrapolating the imminence of a global Ice Age because the daffodils are a little late. An unseasonably warm day or two and the doomsayers have Florida drowning as the ice caps melt.On one Web site there is a story saying that the snow cover in North America, China and Siberia is greater than at any time in decades and that many American cities have had record snowfalls. And, oh yes, the Arctic has refrozen and the polar bears won't drown after all. Another story says Northern Europe is having a record warm winter with little snow and the migratory birds are returning early.March is named after a Roman god, and the pagans believed that their gods often intervened in human affairs simply for their own amusement. Maybe that's why it seems every time there's a global warming rally it snows. It's as good an explanation as any.(Contact Dale McFeatters at McFeattersD(at)SHNS.com. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.shns.com)