You call this rain?

Well so much for another "significant rain event" in the Bay Area. The weekend is drawing to a close and we've had little more than a few showers to show for the first in a series of predicted "major winter storms". What exactly does it take to be a West Coast Meteorologist anyway? I imagine it goes something like this: run weather guessing software, check mountain top camera, cut-n-paste forecast from the Weather Channel, read during evening news, smoke weed, repeat. Not a bad way to earn a living.

We live in a bubble here in the San Francisco Bay Area. It's seldom too hot, never very cold and once in a great while there's some wind and a bit of rain. Yeah, there's that risk of an earthquake I keep hearing about, I'm sure it's gonna shake the state right into the ocean someday. Meanwhile, the rest of the country has been getting perpetually pummeled by a combination of sub-zero arctic blasts and snowfalls measured in feet rather than inches. And people here complain when it's cloudy a couple days in a row. Pussies.

I grew up in Michigan, a state where each change of season poses a very real threat to life, limb and automobile; tornadoes, blizzards, thunderstorms, hail, ice storms and heat waves just to name a few of the more colorful events any given Michigan resident can expect to endure in any given year - and often more than once. In elementary school I endured the blizzard of 1977, where powerful winds blew ten-foot high drifts of snow, literally burying the entire state for about a week; during the my middle school years we lived through a thunderstorm of such incredible ferocity, packing hurricane-force winds, that a gaping hole was ripped in the roof of my house, so large you could drive a Buick through it; one winter in high school a late February thaw turned a snowstorm to rain, melting our frozen vista, yet was cut short by a sudden cold snap, which by morning painted half the state in a couple inches of shimmering ice.

I spent each spring and summer in Michigan marveling at huge gray, purple and black thunderclouds that seemed to hang just above the treetops, which when unleashed would spit great bolts of lighting capable of ripping trees into kindling. If you've never experienced a lightning strike I can assure you the sound is so sudden, shocking and loud that it will knock you to the ground and cause you to scream like a cheerleader at homecoming; it's terrifying and extraordinary, I miss it dearly. In the Bay Area, to my great chagrin, we're lucky to experience even a single gentle, thunderclap during an entire year, it's shocking only because it's so absurd.

So here I sit, yet again waiting for the rain to fall, knowing that when it does I'll have to open the windows, lean outside and strain to hear it patter against the sidwalk and ask, "This is it? Really?". I guess I shouldn't complain, having seen the devastation of last week's earthquake in Haiti I should be thrilled for a lackluster winter storm, it might be boring but at least I have a roof over my head and I'll be dry and warm tonight.