Thank you. As it happens, you are right to wonder...
I'm still not sure exactly what was going on, but at least once the problem was when I requested get_weather('NY','New York');
Apparently it really wants it in the format ('New York','NY') and instead of returning the ERROR_IN_QUERY message, it returned the ERROR_NOT_FOUND error code... all of the errors are negative numbers...

Thanks again,
Benjamin