When I went out to get the Sunday morning groceries and pick up breakfast it was clear as a bell. I didn’t even take a picture (imagine that!) because it was just…blue. Lots and lots of blue.
15:54 – I was squirreled away in my office for several hours after that until all of a sudden the cable signal on all channel got interrupted with one of those emergency weather alerts for a dangerous thunderstorm with potential hail, wind, lightning, and local flooding. It was off in the San Gabriel Valley, sixty miles to our east, but a quick check of the radar showed that the one sparking the alert was just the worst of four or five thunderstorm cells drifting about, and one of them was close to us.
16:59 – One of the cells was very close to Dodger Stadium and Downtown LA, with the Angels playing the Dodgers in the first of the Freeway Series spring training games. Here I could hear occasional thunder and there were a couple of quick, moderate showers, but no real rain – yet.
17:37 – Now it’s raining, and raining pretty good. More thunder, but out in the front yard, looking west, there’s the sun shining through the broken edge of the the thunderstorm cell. It’s quite the spectacle with the heavy rain being backlit by the bright Sun. I ran out to the back yard to see if we might get a spectacular rainbow, but we struck out on that. A couple of miles away there were reports of medium-sized hail and heavier showers, but we just got grazed by the edge of the cell.
19:11 – We get more alerts about “our” thunderstorm cell being a danger to mariners out over Santa Monica Bay to our south where it’s drifted, but off to the north we’ve just got a lot of broken clouds and a highly unstable atmosphere. This however is great for getting a spectacular sunset. With more rain directly west of us, the normal view we have of the pink and golden clouds behind the grove of silhouetted palm trees is grey and gloomy and dark, but looking to the side from the back yard it’s bright and colorful.
19:14 – Behind us to the east, peeking in and out of all of the broken clouds and scattered thunderstorm cells, the 99.9% full moon is rising. Fourteen days to the eclipse. Ready or not…
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 