The first cactus flower of spring!

[ellarien]

DSC07946
Originally uploaded by ellarien.

An unexpected flash of hot pink on a rather grey day.

Right now it's raining, hard. We'll take whatever we can get; El Nino was not particularly generous to Tucson this year.

Comments

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

oh cactus flower!

Drought is the pits. My friend in Australia says they've had six dry dry years but they got a little rain recently and she's so relieved.

[ellarien]

Last year we got almost no winter rain at all, but the summer rains were enough to give us once-in-a-decade floods; this year we were hoping the El Nino winter would mean rain, but we just had the one cold wet week in January, which wasn't nearly enough. This bit of a storm may be the last we see until the summer rainy season, and we're talking a few hundredths of an inch.

I'm not sure I've ever seen a really normal rainfall year since I moved here. And the city keeps growing and sucking the water table dry ...

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

I met a woman who said, "I've been living here for five years and every year they say the weather is abnormal."

The nice fellow says we could come out substantially ahead by betting on a drier-than-average year every year.

[ellarien]

Well, it wasn't such a little storm after all; we ended up with about 0.4in overnight. And my bedroom ceiling has sprung a leak.