Here comes the rain!

mud puddles in the driveway, a rare sight of late

Since when is rain in Western Washington something worth writing about?  Well, since we haven't had rain in 82 days!  It hasn't been this dry (.03" of rain in the last 82 days) since 1922!  In 1922, Seattle went 75 days with only .03" of rain.  We've beat that record by another week of dry weather.  What does 82 days of dry look like around here?  The grass is brown and even the weeds have finally stopped growing.  Hooray for not needing to mow!  The shrubs and trees have shriveled up leaves.  Our stream has turned into a small trickle of water.

When the rain was forecasted to be on the way, Dode and I went around and put things away that shouldn't get wet.  We had a lot of stuff to put away.  In fact, we'd never gotten all the day camp bins put away and that was four months ago!  We have had to move it all upstairs in the garage since the carport where we had them stored is prone to flooding.  We decided it was finally time to get that stuff put away!

It's been a wild weather year here in the Northwest.

On January 19th, almost 7 inches of snow fell on parts of the Puget Sound.  We enjoyed the snow.

Spring brought rain, lots of it. Our stream flooded several times after big storms.   After a whole bunch of rain in 24 hours, we even had the road in front of our house closed do to flooding.

After months of grey skies and rain, we couldn't wait for summer to begin.  It was slow to arrive.  In fact, as of July 18th, Seattle had experienced less than 50 minutes of summer (periods of time when it was over 80 degrees).  On June 12th, even Aniak, Alaska had better weather than us!

But, when summer finally arrived, it just didn't want to let us go.

The crazy thing is that although it's been the driest summer in Seattle in 90 years, we still have experienced 4" more rain so far this year than normal due to our record breaking wet Spring!

Yesterday, when it started raining, the kittens were pretty confused about what was going on.  I realized that they aren't old enough to have experienced rain.  Crazy!

With the coming of rain, it's finally time to put away the shorts and Capri pants and bring out the long sleeved shirts and sweaters.  We've burned off the dust on top of the wood stoves and are enjoying the joys of wood heat once again (freezing cold mornings, trying all day to get the house up to temperature, then roasting all evening when it's too warm in the house!)