Okay, let me rephrase that just a bit, because if you live anywhere with anything like normal weather, this isn’t rain. We’re finally getting a bit more water than “drizzle”, and it’s not “mist”, but if it’s “rain” it’s “really, really light rain”.
Nevertheless, this is one of the most amazing things that one sees upon moving to LA from anyplace “normal”. For two days in advance now, every single local television station has been on “Storm Watch!”. Or they’ve got their “Storm Tracker!” ads running for the 11:00 PM news. I kid you not, I couldn’t make this shit up.
Los Angeles is not washing away into the ocean. We might, might, get 0.10″ of rain out this. Places in the foothills and mountains might get 0.25″ of rain. In the next three to four days combined. Yet from looking at the media and press here, you would think that we should all be building arks in the back yard.
Better yet are the drivers in the rain. Despite the fact that most of them grew up and learned to drive someplace else (presumably someplace where there might be rain and/or snow), LA drivers become even bigger idiots with any moisture at all on the roads.
They fall into two categories, and I suspect that it’s tied to where they learned to drive. The native Angelinos are so terrified by any sort of precipitation that they immediately start driving at 10 MPH, for fear of spinning out and causing a fifty-seven car pile-up. Those who learned to drive elsewhere (but haven’t actually driven in the rain for twenty or thirty years so they’ve forgotten how) don’t bother to slow down at all, continuing to barrel down the freeways at 80+ MPH.
Put them together on the freeway at the same time, along with the layer of oil that’s been laid down on the road in the last 400 or 500 days since the last rain, and it’s no wonder that a “rain storm” that wouldn’t even get mentioned in Boston or Chicago will cause complete gridlock in the Los Angeles commute.
Meanwhile, despite the fact that we live in the desert while wasting billions of gallons of expensive water on our lawns, EVERYONE will ignore the free water falling from the sky and keep their sprinklers going on their regular daily schedule. Half the people do this because they don’t know how to work their sprinkler controls, the other half because they don’t bother.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Here are my Facebook posts from earlier this evening:
…and my Twitter warnings:
I’m doing my part to sound the warning. Now I’ve got to get back to building the ark. Or the zeppelin. Could go either way.
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 