Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

The drought here is moving from severe to extreme. My lawn is slowly but surely turning to dust. The wildfires 250 miles to our south send us smoke once a week as the wind blows in from the southeast. The weather hasn't been brutally hot but there hasn't been any rain to speak of for two weeks now and things look like there won't be any for at least another week. We're behind over 10 inches for this year on top of the 10 inches from last year.

The weather makes for great riding right now. Morning temps in the mid-60's to start and never above 78 by noon. I've been doing 40-50 mile rides eahc day while listening to various podcasts (my new form of crack).

The bad news is the dust and the ants. Petting the dogs is to create cloads of stuff that used to be in my yard. With the dryness, the ants have started coming inside the ants looking for food and water. Each day we seem to have some infestation of Argentine ants to fight back.

The local weather dudes say that we need a tropical storm to move through the region slowly to help the situation now. The problem is hoping for this sort of thing is that you really want to be careful what you pray for. The National Weather Service is saying that we'll have another active hurricane season. Who knows whether Saharan dust will impede formation this year like it did last year but if not I think there could be a lot more destruction than drought relief.

So, I'll be praying for rain but not for the big storms or the thunderstorms with lightning that can spark the types of wildfires that have consumed so much forest down south.

Thanks for reading.

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