Blustery, Blustery day

Winnie the Pooh dealt with blustery days all the time. Maybe because he was in England where it rains regularly. Maybe because Blustery is such a fun word to say. Who knows.

Today, the only way you could describe the weather here in Northern California is blustery. It's raining (whoopee!!! and I'm not being ironic here, we are finally up to 6" (just over) of rain for the year and that's STILL not enough to pull us out of the now severe drought we're in. The combination of accumulated rain that goes to our reservoirs and the snow pack in the Sierras is what keeps California from becoming a dust bowl in the summer time. Last year, our reservoirs were down to a quarter of what should be there.... this year... well, it's not a pretty sight. As for the snow pack, it's starting to grown, but was still just above 50% of normal as of the last survey at the beginning of February.

SO, here it is on a cold, windy, blustery day (not a HUGE amount of rain, but dribble drabbles enough to keep the school kids inside). The usual puddles that turn into lakes at the very thought of rain have not appeared.
(good in some ways, but not so good in others)
(I have very fond memories of putting on my bathing suit after school and splashing through the three foot deep lake that was the parking lot of my apartment complex -- also racing bikes through that amount of water was exhilarating.... I tried to talk my sons into trying it but....)

(Here's the deal, in Modesto, and much of NorCal, water runoff from rain is collected in ROCK WELLS which help gather the water -- the rain can, sometimes, come down in sheets or solid walls of rain -- Rock Wells take HOURS to percolate the rain from the street down through a series of small rocks and dirt and thence to the ground below or to run-off basins.... in the mean time, if a drain gets plugged or if the rain comes really FAST, the rock wells back up and the streets and parking lots turn into lakes. DEEP lakes. That's when you have to NOT drive your car through them or the car stalls and you looks completely stupid for going through when you should have known better.)

But back to the day. It's a good day to stay inside, drink cocoa and get some book work done. (hopefully my accountant has had her breakfast and finished her early meeting to get started once again on my poor little tax account)

I ran out of cocoa mix about four days ago, so no cocoa, but after I finish this, I'm planning on getting down to business (for real!) and logging a bunch of new stock into my database.

Enjoy.