Monsoon Madness

The frequent rains and lingering humidity of the past couple days finally ushered in the expected mold-induced headache, and since my stash of old-school Sudafed with the demon meth-spawning pseudoephedrine is gone, I went with the new, non-methable Sudafed with pseudoephedrine HCl. Whoulda thunk a little hydrochloric acid would mess with a body so badly? Or, specifically, with a body's brain? By the time I got to work I was starting to feel odd, and within an hour was certifiably baked. Since I really needed my brain that day to sort out discrepancies between artifacts and the database, I sat back and stared at my wall and thought deep thoughts about arrowhead manufacture along the Mogollon Rim, A.D. 600-1150, until my eyes uncrossed enough at lunchtime to let me drive home.

Good thing. A couple hours later a dandy monsoon ripped into Tucson, turning the street I take home from work into a car-swallowing river. The Daily Star put a slideshow up here.


Benjie Sanders / arizona daily star

Arizona has a "stupid motorist law," meaning that if you drive around barricades or warning signs into a flooded wash or dip in the road and have to be rescued, you foot the bill for the fire department. Maybe people are lulled into a false sense of security when they don't see the signs on streets that don't look like they should be flood hazards, like Country Club in the photo above. The problem is that Country Club was bult with an inverted crown, meaning the turn lane in the center becomes a running wash when the rainfall is more than moderate, and the water flowing east to west down the cross streets dumps into that inverted crown to create thirty foot wide, two foot deep traps with standing waves at every block. Go out an hour after the storm once the water's receded, and there are the piles of debris and stranded cars like ticks on a giant ruler measuring off the tenths of a mile.

Kayak Tucson Boulevard!