Monsoon, Anyone?

The frogs were croaking this morning when I left for work, at the early hour of 5:00 am. After yesterday afternoon's rain, I wasn't surprised. When the pond fills up, the frogs go crazy. But I didn't expect to sit in my car outside my office for 10 minutes, waiting for the wind and horizontal rain to slow down enough to make a mad dash for the door.

My office windows face south, and all day long I watched the squalls blow through. Heavy rain, then brilliant sunshine, then rain again. I lost count of the separate systems that blew through.

Mid afternoon I took a break and walked outside in the sun, talking with my sister on the phone. We chatted about the weather, among other things, and she mentioned reading a meteorogist's blog about our atypical winter, and that it was too early to give up on snowfall for western Washington. And she was right.

As I left work, driving east toward home, every time I was stopped by a red light, a rainstorm caught up with me. Traffic would move and I'd drive east away from it, only to be caught again. A couple of miles from home, the temperature plummeted and the sky got black, and it started to hail. People came out from the local QFC just to watch it come down, and the wind drove it into the side of the buildings. Between work and home, a linear distance of about 6 miles, the temperature dropped from 48 to 38 degrees, and my car thermometer was warning "ICE." Shades of winter in March.