Category Archives: Weather

Halfway to Christmas!

No sign of any incoming snow here in SoCal.

But the clouds were very nice for about two hours. It looked like there might be a touch of virga around, but we never saw any rain and it was clear and a million by afternoon.

Nothing in the forecast for precipitation, and the temps will be rising. It won’t be “Texas hot,” but the days in the 70’s might be behind us for a while.

Enjoy the upcoming week! Stay flexible and strong, be prepared to pivot when required. Rigid is brittle – bend, don’t break.

Sometimes it’s the simple things that you look right past that can be beautiful and amazing if you just take a second to look.

Take the second.

Make the second.

It’s worth it.

You’re not going to sleep tonight thinking, “DAMN! I wish I had kept hurrying and hadn’t stopped to look at those clouds!”

See it up there on the roof? Shiny and new. Silent. As it’s supposed to be.

We’ve had a LOT of wind the last couple of months and somewhere along the line both of our turbine vents blew a bearing or two. While they’ve still been spinning with the strong winds, they’ve been making a horrific racket.

Our landlord finally got around to replacing them, so now they’re shiny, spinning, and blessedly silent.

With the sun setting into the coast fog moving in from Malibu (the “May gray” as it’s known around here, until it turns into “June gloom”) it shines as it spins, much like the waxy leaves on the palm trees across the street, thrashing about in the breezes.

Just another mid-May day in SoCal.

We got a fair amount of rain last night, which is almost unheard of for Los Angeles in May. Yet I missed the really good stuff, the heavy rain. It moved through while I was spending “quality time” with a new dentist.

Everything was soaked, but off to the east was a humongous thunderstorm cell.

It also appears that I need to clean the lens on the wide angle lens on my iPhone. Or there’s a huge circular alien mother ship that snuck in out of the sun…

Then it was off to the office for a bit.

I found out later that not only was there lightning out there, but down in Compton there were two F0 tornadoes.

All day there were showers all around, but we didn’t get anything other than great clouds.

No rainbows – I guess that would be getting greedy. But it’s good to be greedy sometimes.

All week it’s been in the high 60’s and low 70’s, but by the weekend the warm weather will be back. I’m ready for summer.

After waking up to some more overnight rain, by mid-morning when I went out to take the garbage bins to the curb, the clouds were bright white, the sky was a deep blue, and the sun was out.

Maybe that’s the last of the rain for a while! Maybe! It’s Opening Day for baseball, great weather for it!

Right? I said, “RIGHT?!”

About four hours later as I was finishing a Zoom call, a peal of thunder rattled the house.

For the next hour and a half or so we had lightning, thunder, torrential downpours, high winds, and even about ten minutes of light hail.

It was GREAT!

There were some unpleasant and troubling bits of news delivered today. It was tough. Still is, going to need some time to process, time I might not have.

Nothing life threatening. No one’s dying, no one’s got cancer. We’ll figure it out. (We always do.) But it might not be as much fun as we had hoped for.

On my secondary desktop I had one of the Virtual Railfan sites up and running as eye candy. Hesperia, CA, to be exact. (Which may become more important soon, but that’s a whole different story and crisis.)

The weather there’s been just as rainy as ours, but just as I was looking, the sun same through.

Image: Virtual Railfan

Nice! I took a picture of the screen and passed it around. Maybe it was a sign. (I don’t believe in “signs,” but any port in a storm and there are no atheists in foxholes, so I’m apparently big on cliches.)

Then I went to take a few breaths outside for a minute.

Do you see it? Way, way, way off in the distance? Over by Griffith Park?

It’s not a whole rainbow, but I’ll take what I can get.

It may not have been big, but it was BRIGHT! This little arc of color really stood out.

It doesn’t show up super bright in this image, but to the naked eye even the violet on the left was vibrant.

As the sun behind me was peeking in and out of the clouds, at times it got even brighter, even if it didn’t get bigger.

Someone today gave me the “Hope is not a plan” quote.

Maybe.

But plans can be developed, and in fact are already in the works.

We don’t get overconfident, but when we say, “We’ll figure it out, we always do,” that’s not bragging, it’s confidence in our abilities and our team.

Plans aren’t made in a vacuum, and they’re not carried out blindly or automatically.

THAT’s where the hope comes in. Rainbows help.

This current storm was trying to leave this morning but had filled the canyon below us with fog.

Some think the fog is spooky or ominous. I understand the dangers while driving in the fog, or landing a plane, but I find it calm and quiet.

Through it all I could hear mourning doves crying in the trees. But the sounds of the traffic were muted, dim, distant.