After a week of temperatures 110+ degrees, while the humidity has been steadily rising, the monsoon is here at last.
I am not sure exactly how they calculate when the monsoon finally arrives so I am calling it myself. It arrived at precisely 3:42p.m. today. That is when the black clouds blocked out the sun and the temperature mysteriously dropped about 20 degrees in ten minutes. Not to mention the smell of rain, and not the good kind, the smell of rain that you can only find in an arid region with a lot of pollution. It doesn’t rain much and when it does it smells like the billowing smoke from an enormous industrial furnace, at least for the first few minutes.
I don’t know the numbers, and am not going to waste the time to look them up, but I would guess that at lest 2/3 of the annual rainfall here comes during the monsoon season. This being the latest the monsoon has arrived since 1977 I am not sure this bodes well for the drought we have been in for the last ten years. Hopefully it will at least cut down on the wildfires that have been happening so frequently for the past few months. Hard to say really, even as I sit typing this the sky is black, there is thunder and lightning, it smells like rain, but not a drop has fallen. Or perhaps it is so damn hot that the water evaporates before it gets to the ground?
An upside, well for a twisted mind like mine, is that the news will start to get interesting again. It is so much fun to watch the dramatic rescues of people who were caught in flash floods. Not because I am really that sick that I want to see people die, no, no, I just love to watch it because the cameras are always rolling from the road, and there is always a sign in one of the shots that says either “flash flood area” or “do not enter when flooded”. They had their warning, why are we trying to disprove Darwin?