Seattle put its big, grey hat back on but refuses to drop any measurable precipitation. We are fogged in and clouded over but the ground remains parched and leaves are wilting. It has now been some 60 days since we had any rain (I’m not counting the .01″ that somehow managed to get recorded on Sept. 10th because that’s not even enough to dampen the pavement; the last bit of actual rainfall was sometime back in mid July and even that was less than a tenth of an inch.) Nothing at all in August. Only trace amounts so far in September (another .01″ was recorded at some point, which is just wishful thinking in my book).
We don’t water the grass but we do irrigate the garden and flower beds because their shallow roots just can’t sustain such a long dry spell and our rain barrels are bone dry. Even the trees are struggling. When the temperatures were up in the 80s and 90s I had to water almost daily; now that cooler air has moved in I am doing it less but the sprinkler has been out all summer.There are permanent hose-marks in the dormant grass.
Not that I’m in a hurry to enter the Rainy Season, but a midsummer shower would have been nice. Would have been better for my water bill, too. And now that the clouds are trapped in our Puget Sound bowl, it really just needs to go ahead and rain already. Clean the air, get the dust off the streets, and perhaps put a damper on all those fires we got going over the mountains.
The Erratic Ramblings of an Extraordinarily Ordinary Person 