Rain

The monsoon season continued to disappoint for the better part of two months. Oh, sure, clouds built up and danced around and even sometimes flashed lightning and growled thunder somewhere just out of reach, but the promised rain materialized exactly three times. Even then it didn't have the courtesy to put on a show during daylight hours when we might be able to watch the clouds with rising anticipation, waiting for the telltale gust of suddenly cool wind to cue the rain out of the wings and dance across the desert stage.

No, no, always at night, and usually in such wee hours that we were sound asleep and couldn't be roused to at least hear the water and hail tapdancing on the roof. Three summer mornings we awoke to sodden ground, crumpled programs of downed palm leaves and moraines of mesquite pods left by the rivulets of water across the yard like so much spilled popcorn kicked aside by the audience as it left, the curtain down, the show long over.

Until today. Today, finally, gloriously, afternoon clouds flung lightning to the ground close enough to knock out the power to the office, thunder rattled the windows before skidding off to the east along the curb of the Catalinas, rain slammed down in drops the size of bullfrog tadpoles. You want rain? I got yer rain right here. Rain rain rain, going on for hours now, the initial downpour replaced by steady sprinkles. The trash cans in the park down the street are all on their sides, dazed, accompanied by slightly less surprised tree branches; closer to home, my shovels have been blown across the yard, along with my buckets. Stacks of styrofoam cups that protected plants from the frost a lifetime ago, back when it still dipped below a hundred degrees here, have found new lodgings in the flower bed, the fence, the chiminea, possibly the neighbor's roof. The yard is a lake.

This is usually the time of year that the monsoon winds down, and after months of the near-daily routine of heat --> humidity --> clouds --> thunder --> SPLOOSH, we're usually about ready by now for it to be over. I wonder if it is still almost over this year, now that feels like it's just begun.

Monsoon, Mon-not-soon-enough

The cicadas are in overdrive. Stepping from an air-conditioned office into the parking lot briefly feels good, like a basket of warm towels fresh from the dryer feels good, but the muzzy warm blanket feeling quickly cedes to holy fuck it's hot oppression. Clouds pause at the mountaintops, think about it for a while, and then text all their friends and it's a flash mob of cumulonimbus goodness spilling from the Catalinas over the edges of the basin, promising globs of dark gray there, and over there, and especially over there, rolling over and mercifully blocking the late-afternoon sun, but not yet right here overhead. The mob teases with a few flashes of lightning in the distance and some puffs of promising wind moist with creosote and water on soil, flings a sprinkle of droplets against the window, and then calls it a day.

Maybe tomorrow.

Meanwhile, we roast, and schedule hanging up the laundry for sometime after midnight when it might drop below 100 degrees, and glance up at the single cloud milling aimlessly on the horizon and hope its friends get their shit together a little more productively today.

Monsoon

I am playing strip poker with the thermometer and losing, badly. It was something like 109 outside today and only marginally cooler than that inside, so by 4:30 I was reduced to playing Wii in my underwear. Can the neighbors see? I don't really care. Do my readers now have uncomfortable images in their brains? I don't really care. It is the hottest mid-July monsoon season I can recall, and clothing levels are going to stay just on the wrong side of acceptable.

What's for dinner? Dinner? The hell you say. Or, as my brother says, got any other stupid fucking questions? Fudgecicles are for dinner. They bring sweet, sweet relief for all of two minutes before we segue into discomfort and, no more than three minutes later, back to full-blown misery.

The clouds roll in, finally, blotting out the sadistic sun. Tonight's interpretation of Summer Storm features only a few lightning flashes and thunder cracks as prelude to rain showers in three acts. Dialogue is minimal and the characters aren't really fleshed out to my satisfaction before the curtain falls and the storm caravan rolls on to the west, where from this angle it appears to be trying a little harder.

So the day was given over to watching soccer while attempting minimal movement, that mainly between the chair and the floor in front of the fan, while suspending arms and legs away from contact with any heat-retaining surface, sweating, dozing, and sweating some more. Wambach got international goal #100 while Amy Rodriguez continued to flail. Tobin Heath staked a solid claim to more playing time and we wondered who the new holding midfielder will be, since there's no way Boxxy lasts until the World Cup. In WPS action, Tash Kai staked a solid claim to the number two place in line outside the team shrink's office, right after A-Rod, and the Red Stars watched their slim playoff hopes evaporate off Kerri Hanks' right foot in stoppage time. In related news, the Red Stars' back line spent the immediate 60 postgame seconds looking for holes to crawl into rather than going into the same locker room as keeper Caroline Jönsson.

Let me know when it's October, yeah?

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!

Monsoon Onset

Why do people get excited about monsoon season? the girlfriend asks with mild exasperation. It goes from 110 and dry to 101 and humid, and if it rains it cools off for maybe half an hour and then we're steamy again.

I shrug. 110 and dry, 101 and muggy, to me they're simply different paths to the same level of misery, so we might as well have a multimedia presentation to go along with it.

Most of us love monsoon season, I think, because gives us small packages of drama on a daily basis and we're desperate for relief wherever we can find it. Wispy clouds at sunrise give way to cumulus puffs that build through the midmorning into the afternoon, when they tower with brilliant white anvils above glowering purple-gray bases. The wind swirls here and there, lightning flashes over the mountains, and we wait with growing anticipation, listening for the distant rumble, hoping it comes closer, poised for the elusive whiffs of cool air that organize into a genuine cool gust that ushers in the rain, a few bits of spittle here and there, growing into drops that splat in the dust and finally hammer the desert into submission. If the storm is still building as the sun goes down, the sunset is a watercolor masterpiece painted across the clouds, the dust and ice particles in the air creating a perfect wash of brilliant orange grading through pink into purple, the cumulonimbus canvas backlit and edged with liquid gold.

Yeah, didn't happen yesterday, except for the bit about the sunset. I caught a half-minute's rain on my windshield on the way home, but we did get a prodigious wind that dumped pine needles all over the yard and toppled a few signs between home and the office. The swamp cooler apologetically pumped not very cool air into the house last night, which I spent with the floor fan on full blast, not feeling the need to stick my toes under the sheet until about 4:30 this morning.

But that's okay. Today the slate is wiped clean and we watch the sky and hope again.

Ode to the Heartbroken Mosquito

Your sweet talk in my ear came off as so much high-pitched whining
You tried and tried but never managed to get under my skin
O Anistopheles
I never liked needles
You and me, we never stood a chance.

Seriously. This entire summer and post-monsoon mosquito season, I got two, maybe three bites total. The rest of my household is red, bumpy, itchy, and wondering if it has West Nile yet. Maybe my hide is tougher than I thought; they swarm around my ankles when I work in the yard, but if they manage to get their snoots in for a sip I don't notice. I was oddly immune to poison ivy as a kid too.

Grand Finale

Did I mention the wonderful monsoon? It's winding up with some short-lived but intense evening storms that hit at just about the right time to be lit up by the sunset.

This one dumped seven minutes of rain on TEP.




















Nuthin' like the glow of the sun half an hour before it sets.

Pretty Pretty Mud

The monsoon this year has been just capital. After a few years of fizzling storms that didn't deliver much moisture, the Rillito River actually looked like a river for much of the summer, rather than its usual state as a 15-foot-deep, 100-yard-wide dry ditch. Monster storms at the end of July had it running bankful. We were drawn to the edges to gawk at All That Water.

I set out last week along the river path to enjoy the last bit of gurgling water sounds. Evidence of the water's depth and power were still evident everywhere, with tree branches and uprooted desert broom wrapped head-high around power poles and bridge supports.













This cottonwood was putting out new leaves like mad, oblivious to the debris wrapped around its trunk.

A few days ago the same walk was weirdly quiet, unaccompanied by the soothing water sounds that had been surprisingly easy to get accustomed to. Except for a few patches of damp sand and mud shaded by bushes laid low by the now-gone torrent, the riverbed was dry, littered with rocks, brush, the occasional shoe, the odd shopping cart. Water is a marvelous sculptor and painter, shaping the bed and dropping different sizes of sediment as its velocity decreases and its trajectory is changed by the very mud it itself changes.

I thought they were fascinating, anyway, these wet little moonscapes doomed to crumble in the sun. I'll leave you with four of them (oh, only four pictures of flippin' mud? yes, I am cruel).

Heat

It's miserable everywhere, from what I hear. It's really freaking miserable in Tucson. The monsoons started out promisingly with a couple of weeks of predictable afternoon storms that left the evenings tolerably cooler and rainwashed fresh. The last couple of weeks have brought the heat and wetness building, building in the air but no crashing thunderous release at the end of the day. The 90+ degree temperatures inside the house make sleeping an interesting challenge, even with the brave little floor fan going nonstop. I snooze, barely, for 15 minutes before grabbing the water bottle on the nightstand and rolling over to give the heat rash an equitable shot at the other side of my body. I am in a state of constant sogginess. I fantasize about laying whole sheets of Otter Pops on the bed and collapsing on them for a minute's cool thrill before they, too, melt into puddles.

Otter Pops are helpful. Here is some useful Spanish for Otters.

Hello.	Hola.
Nice to meet you.	Mucho Gusto.
What is your name?	¿Como te llamas?
My name is...	Me llamo...
I am a saltwater otter.	Soy una nutria de la agua salada.
I am a freshwater otter.	Soy una nutria de agua dulce.
Which way to the water?	¿Dónde está el agua?
Is the water cold today?	¿Es el agua fría hoy?
Those rocks are slippery.	Esas rocas son deslizadizas.
Your musk smells lovely.	Su almizcle huele encantador.
How old is your pup?	¿Cómo vieja es su nutria infantil?
That tickles my whiskers.	Ese cosquillas mis barbas.
This kelp is delicious.	Este quelpo es delicioso.
Goodbye.	Adios.

Mi almizcle no huele encantador, porque yo tango demasiado calor. Pobrecita!

Monsoon Special

Hum. Blogger is acting odd this morning. Apparently choosing a font is no longer an option; hope this one remains legible upon posting.

Yesterday was the first major daytime soaker of the season, at least in my neighborhood. More than an inch of rain fell in less than an hour, leaving flood marks far enough off the curb to make it look like Country Club Blvd. was under a couple feet of water at some point. My wretched, hateful acacia trees seem happy; their little wells stayed full for quite a while. Unfortunately, the butyl rubber caulking around the front door has completely surrendered, meaning that our ill-designed inward-sloping entryway helpfully directed the rainwater through the wall and into the front hall.

The rug smells... just... lovely.

In bird news, the doves continue to be pigs with wings, hogging all the seed and the peanut butter suet as well. Here is a white-winged dove (Zenaida porcini) chowing down on the fancy birdseed bell while a female house finch waits patiently in the background before toppling into the thorns of the hateful acacia tree in hypoglycemic shock.

No, not really. The dove eventually gave up on trying to peck millet out of the rock-hard bell and left it to the finches.

Finches, triumphant.