Tag: rain

Some punkins

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments
It wasn’t the last leaf on the tree.

Why, hello there, October. Nice to see you could finally make it.

Yesterday we enjoyed a chilly eastern breeze, which by evening was expected to pack a bit more of a wallop — say, 30-40 mph with gusts to 55, plus rain — and with any luck at all this seasonal weather will strip our pines of their remaining brown needles.

On Thursday I filled three 39-gallon bags with downed needles from the last blustery day after a friend complained that she needed 4WD to scale our driveway with a load of product for Herself’s eBay sideline. The bags filled our trash bin to overflowing with three days before pickup. I had to pull one back out to shoehorn a sack of kitchen garbage redolent of jambalaya fixins into the sonofabitch. The raccoons will rejoice.

Not so the deer, who have eaten all the class foliage in the back yard. They’ll have to settle for silverleaf nightshade going forward or start mowing the lawn.

But yeah, rain. I can’t remember when last it rained. Mid-September, maybe? That’s the most recent mention I can find in the training log. I described it as “a short, sharp downpour” that I just beat home at the end of a 25-mile ride.

This latest blessing from heaven started coming down around bedtime last night and it hasn’t let up yet. We might see a quarter inch before the second cup of joe, which, yay, etc.

I can almost accept that it’s 45° outside, and that the sun doesn’t show its face until breakfast is a fading memory, and that I may be forced to start wearing pants in the morning.

No, not that. Not yet, goddamnit. It’s not even Halloween, f’chrissakes.

After the deluge

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
Good thing we beefed up our tree-retention system yesterday evening.

Too much of a good thing?

The National Weather Service reports an inch and a half (!) of precip’ at the Sunport yesterday. Downtown got flooded overnight, the power went out, the full Noah.

We knew it was bucketing down — the rain was coming in sideways as we hit the sack last night — but we weren’t expecting anything quite so biblical. Before bedtime I added an extra tiedown to our new(ish) ornamental plum, which got blown down the last time we had Shakespearean winds blasting through the back yard.

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!

Our highly unreliable weather widget reports a mere half inch of free water from Tláloc, but we’ll take it. I got up at stupid-thirty to double-check that I’d shut off the irrigation system. If the power croaked here we slept right through it.

So did the Journal. It’s one hell of a note when an old ink-stained wretch is compelled to rely upon the local TV stations for the 411 on the tempest.

The night shift must’ve been drunk … again.

Surf’s up

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments
That garden hose will not be needed this morning.

“Dude. It’s actually raining,” I told my man Hal Walter yesterday via Messages. “If it continues at this torrid pace we could have an ounce of water on the property in two, three days.”

Elena Gallegos, pre-deluge.

Ho ho, etc. That was at 2:19 p.m. Over the next four hours we got nearly an inch of rain with a side of hail that shotgunned more than a few leaves off the backyard maple.

We were under a flash-flood warning and our cul-de-sac looked like a pond tipped on one side, draining into the arroyo behind the house, one of many that funnel water from the foothills to the Rio.

We were happy to get the rain, seeing as we have a couple stupid-hot days coming up later in the week. The neighbor girls were dancing barefoot beneath umbrellas in the runoff.

And I was delighted to have logged a little trail time in and around Elena Gallegos Open Space before the mierda hit the abanico. Those trails hold up pretty well, but 0.86 inch of rain in a few hours is a big ask. We got just 0.27 inch in March, 0.33 inch in April, 0.06 inch in May, and none at all in June. Until yesterday.

In its absence it’s easy to forget the sheer power of running water. A few people got a harsh reminder yesterday; at least three were swept away in the arroyo system, and only two made it out alive.

Noah shit

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments

After the deluge? Nope. During.

Holy hell. Talk about an angry inch.

We just got that much rain between coffee and oatmeal. It sounded like the Bad Old Days, when I lived next to the railroad tracks in a series of shacks. That train just kept on thundering along.

We’d gotten just under 3 inches all year long until this morning.

I’ma go out on a very soggy limb and speculate that this may be a poor morning for the ol’ bikey ridey.

Probably be a good day to swim laps around the house, though.

Water feature

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments

Surf’s up!

Comments, schmomments.

We got rain!

Not much, it’s true. In fact, it has yet to even register on our rain gauge.

But it’s registered on my brain gauge, and that’s enough for now.

And there’s a chance that we could actually see measurable precipitation as the week unfolds, if the wind doesn’t blow it out of town.

Whoops, here comes the sun. There goes the rain. And I hear a crow laughing at me.

Haw. Haw. Haw.

Ma Nature has an interesting sense of humor. At least she didn’t trick me into putting fenders on a bike … again.