| Thursday, March 20, 2008 |
20:12 - Stuff falling out of the sky
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Weather. This place sure does have a lot of it.
Just looking at the Dashboard widgets for the weather here, I find icons for weather phenomena I can't even identify. Something with horizontal blurry lines kept cropping up, something mystifying. After a while I figured out that it was wind.
Today it was windy... like, windy as hell. Rip-through-jacketingly windy. Blow-the-lids-off-garbage-cans, knock-traffic-lights-off-those-little-clotheslines-strung-across-the-intersections windy. And cold... cold enough that come 10:30 at night, some gathering clouds started dumping snow.
It probably won't stick tonight, but it'll be close—and it just goes to show me that at a time of year when I'm used to all but considering summer to be here (Silicon Valley's been having 60-70 degree sunshine for the past two weeks straight), out here on this side of things it's still thoroughly winter.
I never really could quite grok how wintery climates worked, when I was growing up. Cartoons showing kids sledding and skating on frozen lakes gave me to believe that in large areas of the country, the world is frozen white for months at a time, and you don't see a leaf or a blade of grass until sometime in April. That's not quite what it's like here. When I arrived, it had just dumped a few inches on the ground, and the landscape into which my plane descended was a real Winter Wonderland, complete with a frozen Hudson River:
 
But only a day or so later there was no trace of the snow, and daytime temperatures were well into the 40s. A far cry from the "it never gets above freezing" sort of atmosphere I was grimly expecting. But then, the weekend after my first week here, a rainstorm of epic proportions—or, well, what would be epic in California—came washing through, and turned the creek out back behind the house:
...Into this:
   
Another view of what it looks like normally (note the concrete flat part, which was even with the water level, and the vertical stick in the ground off to the right, which marked the highest rise):
Neat, huh? About 18 inches up. (Note the smaller gully off to the left in the flooded photos, turning the backyard into a swamp.) It would have had to rise another three feet or so to start threatening the house, and in that event we'd have more pressing things to worry about anyway, like trying to get to the nearest planetary evacuation pod, so no worries there. But still, it was quite something to see.
Again, I don't expect tonight's little flurry to amount to anything. But it's a firm reminder to me that only about seven or eight thousand people warned me about this. And I DIDN'T LISTEN! I DIDN'T LISTEEEEN!
And I'm okay with that.
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Brian Tiemann
