Calm before the storm

The yellow-orange-red storm is heading our way!

Yesterday was an awesome weather day, sunny, warm… felt like summer. The weather forecasters were predicting some sort of rain today, and I figured they were wrong when I woke up to basically clear skies.

Looks like I was wrong. Or, rather, I will be wrong.

I have a mild obsession with weather and weather radar, though I’ve managed to only make make one weather-related post so far. Anyway, I took a look at my trusty weather radar site this morning and saw a pretty cool looking band of yellow-orange-red rain heading our way!

I love rain, so this is pretty exciting and hopefully it will clear some of the @#$%! pollen out of the air.

Driving through a thunderstorm

The red band of thunderstorms is between us and St. Louis

Marco and I (or at least I; Marco entertains me by talking to me about it) have always watched weather radar, waiting for the colors indicating harder rain to hit us. I watch it because I like the rain and Marco and I like to drive on flooded roads in our trucks, but I digress…

We rarely get the “red” radar images in the Bay Area. The weather radar uses colors from green to indicate light rain, to yellow to orange to red to indicate severe rain. Bernadette and I are in Jefferson City, Missouri visiting her family for Christmas and the Sharks happened to be playing in St. Louis this weekend. It’s a two hour drive from here to St. Louis, which we always have to take in order to get to and from the airport. This time, however, there was a severe band of thundershowers between us and St. Louis, including flash flood warnings and tornado watches. Good stuff.

There’s not much to this story aside from us driving through some of the hardest rain I’ve ever been in, but there are several things I noticed during the drive:

• Missouri highways are very well maintained; I remember when I lived in Washington and was driving west on I-90 between Issaquah and Eastgate. There was some pouring rain and I started to hydroplane in the tire ruts. Granted, I probably had nearly bald tires on my old Honda Accord, but that’s a different story.
• On the two-lane I-70 highway, drivers are quite good about keeping to the right except to pass.
• There are many idiots that don’t drive with their lights on when it’s raining; sure this is now a law in California (and in several other states), but it’s common sense.
• I only saw one Prius. I feel like on my 10 mile commute to work, I see no less than a dozen Priuses… I’ll have to count next time

Somehow I figured this would be more interesting when I thought about writing it vs me actually writing it now. Sorry about that. I do have a queued post in my head about car taillight colors, though. I know everyone’s excited about that.

the smell of rain

tonight i had a “free” night when bernadette went out with her friends for a little dinner and dancing. meanwhile, marco and i had a quiet night like old times with some video games, vodka tonics, and of course, some jack in the box tacos.

since there aren’t any good co-op shooter games out right now (why aren’t there more of these games?), we were forced to play an old game that we never finished. that’s not the important part, though. we were playing with the window open, and all of a sudden, i smelled one of my favorite smells. the smell of fresh rain.

i think it’s ozone or something, but it reminds me of growing up in washington. the first rain of the season, where everything gets cleaned up, reservoirs start to fill up again, and the air gets cleansed. marco claimed he couldn’t smell anything, but i don’t buy it.

does everyone know what i’m talking about here?