Okay, so why is it raining every weekend? and other complaints
Rain, rain, rain here in New England – for the past few weekends. Today is the same.
It doesn’t matter all that much to me, since I set my own hours and weekends are not especially special. But I know it matters to the vast majority of people. And in New England, with its long winters, spring and summer and fall are especially precious, with summer and warm sunny weather a particularly looked-forward-to part of the year.
I know rain is good for the flowers (the weeds, too). Except that the blossoms on the trees – now mostly past – drop quickly in all the rain, and therefore their time is shortened. And vacationers who’ve planned weekend visits and made reservations, as well as the shop and restaurant owners in resort areas – what of them? The businesses need to make a lot of money in the summer in order to keep afloat.
While I’m complaining, I might as well add another gripe: why do so many good events come all at once? I can experience lengthy periods when there’s not much that’s happening in the social sense, and then bingo! Four competing invitations, or several out-of-town visitors on the same day, and no ability to do it all. I realize it’s hardly the worst problem in the world, but it still makes me grind my teeth in frustration that it’s not more spaced out.
Have a nice weekend, folks.
The Rain it Raineth by Charles Bowen
The rain it raineth on the just
And also on the unjust fella;
But chiefly on the just, because
The unjust hath the just’s umbrella.
Gardener’s Prayer by Karel Capek, author of “R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots)” and “War with the Newts”
O Lord, grant that in some way
it may rain every day,
Say from about midnight until three o’clock
in the morning,
But, You see, it must be gentle and warm
so that it can soak in;
Grant that at the same time it would not rain on
campion, alyssum, helianthus, lavendar, and others which
You in Your infinite wisdom know
are drought-loving plants-
I will write their names on a bit of paper
if you like-
And grant that the sun may shine
the whole day long,
But not everywhere (not, for instance, on the
gentian, plantain lily, and rhododendron)
and not too much;
That there may be plenty of dew and little wind,
enough worms, no lice and snails, or mildew,
and that once a week thin liquid manure and guano
may fall from heaven.
Amen.
bof:
I especially like the Gardener’s Prayer.
In the past 3 wks or so we have had a little more than 4 in. of rain. We need it badly. Mountain snowpack was not good this yr. We depend on the snowpack for water to fill reservoirs. We night not get very much rain for the rest of the summer. Soon, everything will be brown. No complaints here about the rain.
Reporting in from South Central Texas. Historically, we average 32 inches of rain yearly. Currently negative 62 inches of rain compared to average over the past six years.
Bad but not as bad as the drought of 1950-1957 where it was negative 92 inches of rain. I remember as a kid my father and uncles talking about that one.
The drought has to end sometime but I pray it is soon. We desperately need the rain. At the same time I do not wish for the floods of 1998 and 2002 that drowned dozens of folks caught out in the storms.
And no, I don’t believe that human-caused Climate Change caused this so don’t even go there. It’s weather.
bof, those are pretty! How did you find them?
Yes indeed, to neo’s points. Precisely this. Today was torrential here. Saturday of Souls on our calendar, so we had Liturgy in the morning, which meant that I hadn’t really planned for other events, anyway. But reaching the church in that storm was a bit of an effort.
It has rained and rained and rained in Central New York every day for weeks. Months. And chilly, too. Every now and then we get a day or two of warmth and sunlight, and we say to each other, “Thank goodness it’s over! The sun is here!” The next day it starts raining again.
Burn ban started June 1 due to dry conditions. Usually starts around July 1. Sunny and hot. Weather service heat advisory for tomorrow. Might get a little rain on Friday.
Soon, everything will be brown.
Same here. We have hit the dry time, but the hills are green and there is still a bit of snow on top of the mountains. But the green is starting to fade, and the canyon river, while running higher than two weeks ago, is running less than last year. The afternoon temperatures have been in the 70’s and I’m enjoying the weather while it lasts. It won’t be long before temperatures are in the 80’s and 90’s.
@bof The Gardener’s Prayer is lovely.
@Philip Sells
They are just things I stumbled across sometime in the last eight or nine decades. Glad you like them. The Czech writer Karel Capek (the C should have a diacritical mark but I don’t know how to type it) is perhaps most famous nowadays for coining the word “robot” for an artificial human.
bof, I see. Another data point to add to my collection of little fascinating tidbits about Czech culture. One of my coworkers has ancestors from there, so this will definitely become a topic of conversation next week.
here in greece we havent gotten a proper rain in over 2 months and it now will probably not be til october or november before we see another drop. (summer in every case is basically 6 months with no rain and often weeks without even a single cloud – water is whatever falls in wintertime).. water was always a marginal affair here even in good years, and a couple of bad years in a row really put things on edge. the government and the tourism business just drill more wells and suck the aquifer down further (in many places they have drilled _below sea level_ and started pulling brackish water under the land!!) and all the springs and wells in the uplands have dried up in recent years, even in a good year. so, i dont ever imagine complaining about rain or snow!!
North Florida: We had a period of 6-7 weeks of no rain and upper 80s, low 90s temps. The sprinklers were running at full tilt. Now moving into the usual Florida summer pattern of the scattered afternoon T’storms. Have turned off the sprinklers for 4 days now. The bad news is our mower broke and the grass is growing. Hope to have it repaired by the end of the week, but by then the grass may obscure the house 🙂
The summer of 1980, it also rained every weekend in June in Boston. I was doing my internship. I remember it well. EVERY SINGLE DAY I HAD OFF.
Meanwhile in L.A., it’s raining brickbats.
nobody, I’m sorry that you’re going through that. Is that throughout the mainland?
the summer of 1980, was hot as blazes in miami, the brickbats had rained in the spring the mcduffie riot,
is that in Athens or farther south,
What do you call the day after two days of rain?
Monday
lee,
There was another year in the mid 80s I believe where it also rained every weekend from late April to mid June in New England. And not just gentle rains, but real downpours all weekend. In CT the usual rivers like the Housatonic flooded, and even the Connecticut River was in flood stage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTedZsnTwhA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4z3oEm9r6g
Hey, it even rained one day in Albuquerque.
We needed it.
DT:
I’d heard that as local wisdom from Seattle.
If climate is changing, it will be seen in floods and droughts. So the right response should be … prepare, More, for floods and droughts. Which is also good even without big human caused changes.
We don’t know what caused the ice ages, nor why they ended.
Raining on the parade of tech knowledge & progress, here’s a good note about how the World As We Know It, is ending. (Or is that reigning in?)
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-ten-warning-signs?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=wm1qp&triedRedirect=true
The big yellow ball
in the sky
caused the ice
to come and
to go bye.
Bye.
Hand lettered sign seen at the LA riots, “No one loves Mexico like the people who refuse to live there.”
Yeah, you know the riots are “spontaneous”–and definitely not organized and pre-planned–when all of the protest signs have been run off at some print shop, and conveniently stapled to sticks, and trucks drop off pallets of bricks, or easily broken up cement blocks at strategic points for the rioters to have access to, so that they can use them as missiles.
It rains on weekends because you have a neighbor like Aubrey. Who waters his lawn on Friday, thus causing heavy rain on Saturday and Sunday.
Come to think of it, I have some relations in Massachusetts….
Not only are all the signs printed, they have plywood shields with metal handles overlaid with cardboard to make them “look homemade.”
https://x.com/wokal_distance/status/1931953269775188449
@Snow on Pine:Hand lettered sign seen at the LA riots, “No one loves Mexico like the people who refuse to live there.”
I think that’s a photoshop, because the woman carrying it isn’t lying bleeding on the ground.
But a lot of us thought the same at the big “immigration” protests under Bush, and the Word went out to switch to American flags because of the negative feedback they were getting: if you want to stay in America so badly why are you carrying Mexican flags?
It’s been a sluggish spring in MN. Or a sluggish summer. We get a couple of beautiful days, but then a couple of dreary days. May was surprisingly cold and damp.
The thing we say here is: if you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes, it’ll change. Probably true. When summer comes, it’ll be blazing hot with lots of humidity, and people will be missing these cool spring days.
In other words, as the doggerel goes:
“As a rule, a man’s a fool
When it’s hot, he wants it cool;
When it’s cool, he wants it hot,
What it is, he wants it not.”
Our perception of rain and drought is another result too much data and too little understanding. This is nature! Full of random swings and “records”. Back in the day, people had much less knowledge and far more understanding.
Our perception of rain and drought is another result of too much data and too little understanding. This is nature! Full of random swings and “records”. Back in the day, people had much less knowledge and far more understanding. People now talk about “droughts” lasting two months, instead of 10 years, or even 50 years.
B
The TX drought in the ’50s was so bad it got mentioned in a song. The Merry Little Minuet: THE KINGSTON TRIO
Still true 6 decades later, except for “starving in Spain.” I doubt that even in the 1950s they were starving in Spain—Spain’s 2 plus-decade economic boom began in the 1950s—but you needed something to rhyme w “rain.” Maybe “Franco’s still in Spain,”(SNL Franco is still dead…) though my opinion of Franco’s still being in Spain has changed from that being a bad thing to being a good thing.
Two neighbors have complained to me that this summer is really hot. My reply is that it’s always been hot in Texas in the summer. At least we don’t have the drought of 2011-2012, where the daily high was above 100 for over three months.