Paul and I left Seattle the day after the winter solstice. On the way to the airport, I pointed out a clear yellow light between the trees. “Look,” I said to Paul, “something’s on fire!” We drove a little farther, and I realized that my “fire” was the low, late afternoon sun, visible through a break in the clouds. Technically, the sun is burning, but I thought I was seeing something a little closer to home. This was the first time that I’d seen the sun in several days. As our airplane’s wheels left the ground, the blustery winds nudged us; raindrops slid down the windows, obscuring any view.
After six days of basking in Houston’s December sunshine, we flew home to Seattle. Rain greeted us at the airport. The sun put in an appearance later that day, streaming through the narrow gap between two stormfronts. That night the rain returned, and it has done so every day since.
Seattle has had measureable rainfall each day since December 19. That’s 26 consecutive days of rain. Today the rainy streak became the second longest here since the National Weather Service began keeping track in 1931. One more week of rainy days will tie Seattle’s record, set in 1953, of 33 straight days of rain.
If the forecast is correct, Seattle will have a new record for rainy days next weekend, but I’m not going to be here to see it. Next Thursday night, Paul and I are getting on plane to California… where there’d better be sunshine.
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I hope you hit sunshine in California too, it is pretty much a given that you will !
Michele sent me today.
No fair escaping it! I’m stuck here.
Hey from a fellow soggy Washingtonian. Came this way from Michele’s.
Could you please send some our way? The ranch is a tinderbox, and we actually think about where to turn the car around so that the muffler doesn’t inadvertently ignite the place. On Christmas night, a neighbor’s campfire touched off a burn, which was stopped only by the dirt road and a field recently plowed for winter rye. Water is good.
We have had 60 - 70 temps and last night, or should I say 3:30 am this morning the severe thunderstorms moved through with three tornado warnings because of the hook echoes on radar. Nyssa was ticked that it took almost 10 minutes to get a live person on the local tv channel to report on what was happening. In Mississippi and Alabama they have been known to preempt all network programming for a whole evening during bad weather, constantly giving reports, spotters everywhere, computerized tracking that names every little village in the path of the storm and such. Lots of lightening, lots of thunder, some wind but we did fine without the reports. Now they say we will have snow showers by early tomorrow morning. Then back to 60 degrees by Tuesday. Somehow the rain sounds good, constant, not schizophrenic like the weather here.
Too much rain makes for a melancholy mood. But thankfully you’re headed off to Lotusland again.
Although if memory serves, it’s raining cats and dogs there, too.
Sigh….the weather is mucked up wherever we go.
I don’t know if I ever told you that Pittsburgh (where I went to college has precipitation patterns similar to Seattle’s. During my mandatory semester writing for the college newspaper, I had to conduct vox pop interviews with people on how they felt after 20 straight days of heavy rain (which would go on for at least another week). They were about as glad to talk to me as you would imagine.
But I did get a money quote from my roommate, who saidthat the weather made her feel “sluggish and primordial.”
I feel your pain, m’love, and I hope those sunkissed, lotus-eating, thirsty gods of weather in California decide to show you a little mercy.
We would happily take at least seven days of rain in Houston. We are setting a record for the most consecutive days of dry, mild, sunny days in December and January. Even when a cool front comes through and lowers the evening temperature, no showers accompany the front.
But my aperwhite narcissus are in full bloom. Last week Max wanted to pick some for his mother. I was reminded of the onion flower bouquets you and Mel used to pick on your way home from school. Barbie.
We had a bit of hail on Tiger Mt. today. Now it’s raining again! May I borrow your beautiful umbrella, Kimberly?