Tales From the Monsoons

The monsoons have finally arrived, albeit with a whimper.

Friday night as I was getting ready to go to work (the hotel night job, 11pm to 7 am three nights a week), Ron and I heard the unfamiliar but unmistakable sound of rain. Fairly hard rain. We cheered. Rain!

I left for work, and even though it's only a ten-minute drive, I was only halfway there when the rain stopped. Ron told me later that it didn't even rain enough to measure one one-hundreth of an inch (0.01) on our weather station. Sigh.

Saturday night (or more accurately, Sunday morning, about 3:00), I was at work and again heard the sound of rain and smelled the scent of rain. A few minutes later, Chris (the security guard) and I went outside. It was raining very lightly, hardly more than a mist. We stepped out from under the porch overhang to feel the rain. We joked about singing in the rain, and we both spun around a few times (individually), arms outstretched. We knew we were being silly, but he's a nice kid and we were OK with being silly. We were just enjoying the rain for a few minutes.

When I got home in the morning, I checked the weather station and sure enough, it hadn't rained enough to register anything on the station. I wonder if we could adjust it somehow so it would register one one-thousandth of an inch, but maybe that would be too depressing.

Then yesterday we got real rain. Hard rain that lasted about half an hour! Complete with a few rumbles of thunder. It happened late in the afternoon when I was at my other job (psychologist, 2:30 to 4:30 Monday through Friday). I drove home in the pouring rain, reminding myself how to drive in the pouring rain. By the time I got home, the rain had stopped, of course, and I checked the weather station. We'd gotten thirty-six-hundreths of an inch (0.36), which doesn't sound like a lot, but it's actually huge. Prior to that rain yesterday, we'd only gotten 2.15 inches of precipitation since January 1, mostly in the form of snow. So to get 0.36 in half an hour or less is a LOT of rain. It puddled up along the shoulders of the roads, causing some cars to almost hydroplane. The ground was so dry, the rain soaked in quickly, too quick for the dirt courtyard to turn into mud (thank you, rain gods).

I'm writing this in the afternoon and the sky is turning dark and cloudy again, and I'm hoping for more rain. I think everyone in Taos is hoping for more rain (except the tourists, I guess).