First Rain

I am a god! Zeus, apparently! I can trigger lightning!

It’s easy! When we get a thunderstorm nearby, I turn on my cell phone camera trying to capture video of lightning. There will be no lighting to be seen for the entire time that I’m recording. However, within two seconds of ending the recording, lighting will strike right in the middle of the frame! It happened multiple times today. I can trigger lightning! I am Zeus!

It remains to be seen if I can cause lightning to appear on command (or lack of a command) out of a clear, blue sky. If I can… Let’s just say that there’s a list, and there will be signs that I have a new toy to play with.

I got up this morning to find not just a few scattered clouds, but complete overcast with some nasty, dark, low clouds moving in from the southwest. The weather radar was showing light showers down over the “Inland Empire” areas of the LA metro area, which were turning into convective cells (i.e., thunderstorms) as they were pushed up the mountains and got heated over the desert.

The weather app also said we had a 55% chance of rain today – that couldn’t be right!!

An hour later, I was sure that I was hearing thunder. For a reason, it turns out.

We had two separate thunderstorm cells near us, one to the west, and one to the southeast. Based on the timing between the lightning flashes and the thunder arriving, this was about three and a half miles away and coming straight at us.

I moved a chair out into the back yard, started watching the thunderstorm and rain, watching the four or five hummingbirds that were feeding at our two feeders, and listening to the trains from two different lines running past our house on either side. The Long-Suffering Wife referred to me as being “in hog heaven,” and she’s not wrong.

This went on for the better part of an hour, after which it moved on toward Barstow and parts north.

I know for many you who have weather like this on a regular basis, my reaction sounds overblown and hyperbolic. But we don’t get this sort of activity often. In LA, while we might have eight or ten or a dozen rainy days a year (maybe), we would only get more violent weather like this once every several years. It’s slightly more common up here in the desert, but not much. To get it out of nowhere with little or no warning just a month after moving up here is quite a treat!

LET ME HAVE MY JOY!

There were more New Forever Home Firsts (NFHFs) later in the day. I saw our first squirrel up on the brick wall in the back yard. (Coincidentally, I also put up the first birdseed feeder near that wall earlier today, but he didn’t seem aware of it and never went near. Concidence, or timing?) I also saw our first fence lizard, a decent-sized (8 inches maybe?), all black critter skittering along the back wall toward a row of planters in that back corner.

Finally, there were some interesting tidbits that may point to a most interesting first-time realization about our new house. At the height of the storm, about 10:45, the Virtual Railfan webcam that’s less than a mile away went off the air. Folks were talking about the power being out as SC Edison cut power in a lot of places due to the wind and lightning, in an attempt to minimize the chances of starting a brush fire is something went wrong. And when we went out to dinner, the restaurant was closed (no power?) and we saw a couple of traffic lights that were out or had been out.

So all signs point to a reasonably widespread power outage from about 10:45 to 17:00. Were we lucky that we never lost power or noticed any problem at all? Well, if you think it’s “lucky” that we have a whole slew of solar power panels on the roof…

Not a blip, not an iota of problems with our A/C, computers, lights, refrigerators, cable, internet, etc…

Yet another reason we’re both really liking this house!