A Brief Interruption of This Garden Blog to Talk About Rain

I know precisely when it started to rain this morning. At the exact moment when I pulled into a parking spot at work and put my car in Park. At that precise moment, the rain suddenly came down in a huge deluge as though a month’s worth of rain was all trying to come down at once. From a pure “cause & effect” standpoint, I might have believed that the mere act of me putting the car in park caused the rain, so close together were these two events.

“Shoot,” I thought, “If I had not stopped at Starbucks to get an iced green tea, I’d be in the building now instead of outside in my car trying to figure out how to get inside without getting soaked”.

Well, I did make it inside, and I did get wet, but not too wet. It has continued to rain all day, and it is still raining. Since I put away my rain gauge when I put away other garden ornaments, I don’t know how much it has rained here. But I know it’s a lot. Bucketfuls (or is that Bucketsful?)

And, naturally, the weatherman on the evening news did not tell us how much rain we got. He said things like “This is a very interesting storm”, and “It’s not behaving as we expected”. I wish they would just admit that they didn’t get the forecast quite right. We are not going to get nearly as much snow tomorrow as they had forecasted. It all went to the north of us.

And, believe it or not, they had a reporter standing by the side of the road talking about how the roads are wet and there is some standing water in some places, so be careful. As though we’ve never seen rain before. I think they scheduled her to “work the sidelines” during this, our first winter storm, and decided to go ahead with her investigative, on site reporting on wet roads, in spite of it not being as wintry as they thought it might be.

They also provided a link to a web site which shows where the priority snow removal routes are in the city with another link to the current road conditions. When I checked the current road conditions, I found interesting, but useless, information for March 21, 2006. Hmmm, seems as though if there is enough rain to have a reporter standing by the side of the road reporting on it, they would have updated this all important web site to let us know the roads are wet.