(no subject)

We had our first storm of the monsoon last evening. As usual it blew up fairly quickly. The weather reports are a bit useless this time of year. You just have to watch the sky. I saw heavy clouds outside in the afternoon and checked the radar online. It showed a storm building over the mountains to the southeast of us. I didn't pay much attention to the way it was moving, because usually this time of year the storms move northward, and I was not sure whether I'd get any rain at all. This storm turned out to be moving to the northwest. It came into town just before dusk, the time of peak strength of our summer storms. I got a nice long rain. The whole north side of Tucson got clobbered with wind. My lights were off for a few seconds. A few thousand customers lost power well into the night.

My cat was not very happy about the storm. When there was continuous distant thunder from the mountain on the east, he got very chummy, looking for reassurance by lying on me and trying to snuggle. When lightning struck a few times closer he took off and cowered in hall in the center of the house where there are no windows, as if he were a Midwesterner in a tornado warning. That part of the storm was over quickly.

In fact the storm seemed to race up the valley toward the northwest, only grazing the mountain on Tucson's north, and thus avoiding major flash flooding from that mountain's burned hillsides.

Also good news: I shouldn't have to do any watering this week.