Filed by NinjaDoll on September 24th, 2007
Living in Hawaii has its advantages, but it also has its disadvantages. One of those disadvantages is severe weather. You learn to brace yourself against some of the foulest weather on earth: thunderstorms, torrential tropical downpours, the occasional Cat 3 hurricane. Since I’ve been in SoCal my concerns have shifted from weather patterns to temperatures: “it’s too hot,” “it’s too cold,” and my sister’s and my beautiful day phrase, when it’s about 70 and sunny, “if it were like this all the time it’d be perfect.”
So when the alerts began popping up on my desktop about an “unusual September storm” headed our way, I was intrigued. I haven’t really had to break out the umbrella and boots much since I got here. I recall only three or four days of appreciable rainfall from last winter. This was going to be fun! I took the umbrella out of the closet and posed it by the door, cautioned my mother and daughter to fetch their raincoats, and wondered if a storm in this desert would be like any I’d seen rolling through the Kalahari on TV. Weathermen – and my desktop weather alerts – touted this as the biggest September storm to hit the area in two decades.
Friday’s skies were gorgeous, streaked with a few dark clouds “over there,” so I figured this meant the storm was simply going to pass us by. But no, it didn’t. It hit with all the ferocity of a feather on Saturday morning. We had the meanest damned drizzle the area had seen in a long, long while.
I’d heard from Matt (of Matt & Melissa fame) about how confused SoCalians become when their windshield is hit by a drop of rain. I thought surely it can’t be this comical, with people racing around in a daze once a minuscule bead of water plooped from the sky.
Sadly, it is very true.
On Friday morning, one of the girls at The Kid’s bus stop remarked, “OMG! Was that a raindrop I just felt on my face?” My kid turned to look at me with that “geezus” kind of look she does so well. I wondered if that poor, raindrop-assaulted child would be able to make it through the day. I prayed for her; it would’ve been awful if that deluge had dented her cheek.
On Saturday morning, I loaded mom and child into the car to head over to Tracy’s place. The 163 was a bumper car race, with some cars dashing ahead at 80mph only to break suddenly behind some other cars going 55mph. The road was…dry. The sky was…cloudy. It seemed as though some were trying to get where they were going before anything wet hit their windshields, while other were taking their sweet ol’ time so a raindrop could fall in front of them, on someone else. It was hilarious. I chuckled as I navigated the lanes, trying to avoid les idjitmobiles.
In hindsight, I think my little family did rather well during our first freakish Californian weather anomaly. We’re still confused about the fracas but hey – it was something different!
I even took pictures to share with you. The first is of the downpour as it fluttered past our neighborhood, the second is of the amount of rain that hit the walkway outside our door. The third is of the lovely (and usually non-existent) clouds that filled the sky – making it look ever so much like a typical sunny day…in Hawaii.
