Tuesday, July 04, 2006

Light Show

Sacramento summers are insanely hot. There's no point in being outdoors when it's 110 degrees, the sun is blazing down, and the pavement is practically vibrating with heat waves. Many summer nights in Sacramento are unbearable, without a breath of a breeze to redeem them. But, after a few days of incessant baking and roasting, the hot air rises just enough to pull in some cooler air from the ocean, through the Sacramento River delta. Even after the air travels some 60 miles from the bay, it retains enough cooling power to restore livability to Sacramento. It's called the delta breeze, and if you don't have air conditioning, you spend a lot of time pining for it.

Here in Monument, it seems that the summer thunderstorms work somewhat in the same way. Lately, we have been getting four or five days in a row of clear, hot weather, followed by a day of building clouds, and then an intense thunderstorm. The following day will be humid but sunny and clear, starting the cycle over again. I don't know if this is considered normal weather here or not; the statistics say that we average 14 inches a year of rain. That's not much... about the same as Los Angeles. It seems like we're getting more rain than that, but what do I know?

We get to watch the clouds form over the mountains. On days that it doesn't rain, clouds pile up behind the mountain and just seem to get higher and higher, then they slowly dissipate before sunset. On the stormy days, the clouds pile up behind the mountain, then spill out into the sky, getting darker and more threatening-looking every minute.

In the past week we've had three thunderstorms. I'm not sure if the first one even got to town. All evening we watched huge lightning strikes thread across the sky and light up the mountains to the southwest of here. The second seemed like a normal storm. We saw clouds rolling in, the wind picked up, we saw lightning in the distance, then the storm hit us with pelting rain, and the town was surrounded by lightning strikes. Very dramatic, and also had the side effect of spilling out of the gutters and into the basement (damn!).

The town fireworks show was on July 3rd. A dramatic summer storm rolled in about an hour before the show was scheduled to start. The lightning seemed to be all around us, and it was bright enought to light up the hills. No rain with the lightning, so they went ahead with the fireworks even though it was getting pretty windy.
The fireworks staging area is right on the other side of the river from the school. Folks sit at the end of the football field and get a great view of the show with a mountain as a backdrop. During the show, the fireworks alternated with lightning. About halfway through the show, the power in town went out for a few minutes. Without the streetlights' glare, the combination of the storm and the fireworks was even more incredible. By the end of the show, it had started to rain a little. Everyone scurried off into the night. There was a street karoke party planned for the city park after the fireworks, but it was rained out. Too bad, because last year's street party was really, really funny.

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