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.
“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.
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.
There are moments when the summertime heat feels almost bearable. Say, when there are no pressing matters and a pool sits nearby. There is an iced beverage sweating in a tall glass and a broad umbrella throwing a soupçon of shade. Someone else is picking up the tabs.
But even then. …
When I was a kid on Randolph AFB the San Antonio summers were murderous. Crouch under the Fedders window unit and play board games or haunt the officers’ club pool like a toasty ghost.
Tucson? Don’t get me started. I drove a 1974 Datsun pickup with no air conditioning, and my guest-house rental (also sans a/c) was a long, slow-rolling, late-afternoon drive from The Arizona Daily Star, where I labored in dubious battle with Young Republicans and old fascists.
Mostly I passed my days at the pool there, too. Not at the Star; at the University of Arizona, where the coeds weren’t yelling at me all the time unless they caught me drooling.
Now here I am in The Duck! City, where everything I do makes life hotter and the windows of opportunity are quickly closed and curtained against the sun.
Cycling. Running. Cooking. Especially cooking. Sometimes I feel as though it’s me browning in the skillet.
Not an early riser by nature, I find myself compelled to rush through the morning’s rituals so I can get out and back in while Tōnatiuh is still warming up in the bullpen.
Coffee. The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, the Albuquerque Journal. More coffee, with toast this time. The litter box. Not for me, for Miss Mia, who has already been in there a time or two while I was ethering my sputtering carburetor. Then the baño for me.
A bite of breakfast — yogurt with granola, oatmeal with nuts and dried fruit, a mandarine, or some combination of these. No tea, it’s already too hot, and we don’t want to overclock the old CPU. Dole out some water to the parched foliage.
And then — hey, what’s that sound, everybody look, what’s going down? — it’s raining. Not for long, not in any quantity (0.01 inch), and it evaporates from the chip-seal in the cul-de-sac before the echo of the raindrops fades.
But still. Music to the ears. Maybe I’ll have that cup of tea after all.
Mad Blog Media 