Seriously, how the hell was your week?

Overt Pert Alert

As I was coming home from a very early Wednesday morning session at 8AM, tiny motes were being blown across College Station Road by a fierce wind, lit by sun rising beneath a large dark cloud. I can probably be forgiven for wondering what grass was now liberating its progeny - it was, after all, in the area of a very nice naturalized planting - but probably not for taking another thirty seconds to realize it was a snow shower.

It lasted through my drive home, about thirty minutes and over 14 miles. I don’t think any flake survived impact but it was quite a nice sight.

The rain has been good to us this month - we’ve had 4.88 inches over five well-spaced 1-2 day rain periods, and that’s 0.35 inches above normal for February. Here’s Goulding Creek, six months apart.

With the caveat that “the drought” and “the effects of the drought” are two different things, even during the greatest effects of the drought, the greenery is startling compared to the same area a few days ago. While there may appear to be water here, and there is water, it was still, thin, stagnant, and only a trickle of any flow. And that was a relatively wet part of the creek.

August 23 2007

February 24 2008

Aug 28 2007

Feb 24 2008

Here’s one of the several markers I put in place last summer. I specifically chose a threshold position for this one, on the verge of being dry and covered with water, and yet which I knew was well within the creek bed. We’ve gone from zero inches of water, to about 5 cm by the end of December, and are now at 12.5 cm. That’s still low, but at least you can now hear the creek as you approach it!

So February joins December 2007 as delivering a surplus of rain. Not a great surplus, but enough to deliver the appearance of normalcy. And that’s the danger - things look back to normal enough to forget that we haven’t otherwise hit a normal month of rain since October 2006 (and that only because it’s our driest month, and therefore easy to master).

Once increased warmth raises vapor pressure and the trees wake up and begin that evapotranspiration stuff, then we’ll see that this is something of an illusion. We don’t, after all, have snow melt around here!

I couldn’t resist mentioning this very fine new hole observed a few days ago. It’s about six by twelve inches, so it’s a fairly large one. It’s been dug next to a modest sweetgum, into and around the taproot system.


Looks like a nice place to live! Hope they don’t have a subprime!