Let's talk about the weather

It's been a blustery, windy, rainy day here.  The rain poured out of the sky in abundance.  It's been raining pretty steadily all whole week and doesn't look to be stopping until sometime on Saturday...just in time to cancel the Golf Tournament, again.  Sigh.

Anyway, this week the ground has given way in a few places leaving some friends standing on one side of a mudslide with their house on the other side.  Usually, these slides are removed quickly but this one keeps shifting and moving and the rain keeps coming down so there's been little process in clearing the mud away.  The families on this particular road are adapting.

Today's storm caused our local emergency dispatch workers to earn their pay.  There's a couple of websites that someone just as curious as me (ahem**Meg**) pointed me to and I kept their feeds open on my browser pretty much all morning.  I listened to call after call come in of wires down, roadways flooded and watched outside my office window as the rain poured on.  I counted 11 different "wire's down" incidents in one sitting.  Trees were falling all over the place.  At one point a call went out for the local fire station, to which they responded, "we have no one to send out, everyone's busy, get someone else."  Kinda made me laugh.  (It was a false alarm, literally, BTW.)  A friend came by for about a half hour, just to talk, and while he was there a tree cracked and groaned outside...our eyes immediately swung to the window, watching and waiting for a tree to fall...nothing.  The power kept flickering and I knew that today was not going to be the day to get much done.  So I went to coffee with K and watched the rain come down from the warmth of the coffee shop and enjoyed an hour or so of conversation with a friend.  It was good.

There are many who are done with the rain, who want it to stop, who are ready for Spring and so on and so forth.  Not me.  I missed winter this year.  Granted, I live on the coast in CA, we don't get winter like the East Coast or Mid West but I missed our winter.  The two or three dry, balmy weeks in January were wrong, wrong, wrong.  The weather we are having right now, that's January winter.  The last couple of years our weather patterns have been all off.  Summer was cooler than fall, winter warmer than spring, something has shifted and it makes me wonder...what's next?  Is it going to be blazing hot summer?  Time will tell...