Wet Weather

We're at it again, assuring the tourists to come on down because it's barely raining and it'll be over soon; meanwhile, the desert is thriving with record rainfall since January.

The storm came up the mountain ridges from the Gulf area, by-passing Arizona on its way to the Coachella Valley. Yesterday, with the windows open and the dogs watching what's going on in the neighborhood, the storm paused over my little piece of the landscape. The lighting was brilliant and the thunder ferocious, shaking the house with boom after boom, and sent the dogs running for cover. Sand is porous, so it doesn't absorb the water, which creates running rivers, roadway lakes, and sandslides that move alarmingly fast through neighborhoods and across roadways. Today, roads are closed and more rain is on the way, but drivers who have their own agenda fail to accommodate their driving to the conditions.

Through it all, drivers push the accelerators harder, perhaps pissed because some of the old fogies slow down to avoid hydroplaning through the rivers and lakes where once was dry pavement. The law says drivers are to drop their speed 10 miles per hour during inclement weather, but the opposite effect is true more often than not. Yesterday, for example, a man was killed on the interstate after he was involved in a rain-related accident. When he got out of his vehicle to check the damage, another speeding driver hydroplaned and killed him. In a second incident, a news van covering the weather-related stories was parked off the side of a road, taping a warning for drivers about the danger of driving too fast and hydroplaning. As the news report was being taped, a speeding vehicle hydroplaned into their news van; fortunately, the crew avoided being involved personally in the incident. The occupants of the car ran from the scene, but were later arrested and booked for driving under the influence.

My yards are drinking up the moisture, rebounding from the recent manscaping B and his lady did for the fall clean-up. If there was doubt about some of the plants surviving the cut-back, it no longer exists, thanks to the rain. The dogs are still at the windows, watching what's going on and wondering why we're not taking our walk this morning. Perhaps we'll go when I get back from work today, but that will definitely depend on how much water is either falling from the sky or obscuring the roadway we share with the drivers. Because we don't have sidewalks, it's a bigger issue which direction we walk and what time we're sharing the pavement with the speeders.