Finally the Time of Rain has returned

So we're finally getting some much needed rain here in the SF Bay Area & Northern California. I think we are working on our 3rd drought year if things don't start turning around. But as sure as rain here means snow in the mountains, it will only be a few days of rain before people start to complain about the rain. Whether it's the weather media, folks that need a daily intake of sun, or the peeps that built a house too high and too close to the edge of a cliff that's been burned by fire and is now a mudslide hazard (very niche I know); they will complain enough with the rain.

Sorry to put a damper (pun intended) on your complaining folks, but we need more rain than we can almost imagine to get out of this precipitation deficit we're in. Like it or not, California's lack of rain has begat the following Cycle of Rain (or lack thereof):

• Lack of Rain means drier vegetation longer in the year
• Very dry vegetation & weather helps to lead to brush fires
• Brush fires mean bare hills with nothing to hold the ground together
• When rain does come it causes mudslides
• Brush finally does regrow though with the rain
• When the drought returns, the cycle starts all over

So this may not be a real logical cycle (so does that mean it's an illogical cycle?), but this is how I perceive how rain and it's effects are viewed here in CA when it doesn't have to do with snow pack, runoff, or agriculture irrigation.

But the point I'm not making very well here is that we need the rain very badly folks. Until cheap industrialized desalinization plants become part of normal life materializes (will it ever?), we need every drop of rain we can get. Yes mudslides suck, but maybe you shouldn't have built your house or moved into a house at the bottom of a hill, on a hill, or close to the edge of a cliff. That's one of the risks you need to just suck up when you have a house there, like earthquakes is a risk of living on a fault my family has had to accept. (BTW, that was the un-PC part of this rant.)

Back to the main point, we need months of never-ending rain to get back into the black. To get there we will have to live through the negative aspects and suck it up. To the weather media: stop tryig to report on the bad all the time. We need the rain so just keep reporting that rain is good for us. To people that just need their daily sun fix: get a UV lamp and go grow yourself :-).

That has been your Sunday report by your friendly neighborhood crumudgeon who loves the rain and hope we have it for days to come. :-)

Have a great week!