Making It Rain - by Philip

The twin thing rears its uglier head again. I was just writing a post about the weather here in San Francisco when Douglas posted his piece about the snow in Birmingham. Now, I’m not coming right out and accusing him of pre-plagiarism, but this is the second time that he’s done that. Stay out of my head, evil twin! Admittedly, a major snowstorm in Birmingham might be a good reason to write about the weather there since that only happens once every… forever. It also might be a good reason to re-read Revelations, just to learn how to keep an eye out for the other three horsemen.

But before I get started, I’d like to call attention to the fact that Douglas said that they got three inches of snow, but I read a report that said it was actually five inches. I don’t know which account was correct, but I just wanted to point out that this is the first time that Douglas has ever underestimated a number of inches. That’s right, I went there, girlfriend. Oh crap, I forgot we’re identical twins. Never mind.

But on to the much more important topic of what is happening outside of my window right now – it’s raining! Okay, that might not seem like a big deal, but it’s really raining, like, a whole lot. Okay, so that still doesn’t sound like a big deal, but trust me, it is. I moved to San Francisco in June of 1996 and it didn’t rain until the following October. That worried me a lot since I had come from New Orleans where it rains pretty much every day from June through October. It turns out that California has an actual rainy season so it pretty much only rains here in the winter. I thought that rainy seasons were just something that happened on the Discovery Channel, but apparently they're real and can even occur right here in America. Who knew?



So why is all this rain in San Francisco a big deal? I’ll give you three reasons:

1. We have gotten rain for about 20 days straight now in San Francisco, which puts us at the halfway point to Noah’s all-time record. In just three short weeks, I could be landing an ark on Mt. Ararat with a few million pairs of uncharacteristically well-behaved animals.


2. We’ve had three straight years of drought, so this rain is extremely welcome by everyone who wasn’t trying to have little league practice last weekend. Despite having so much rain recently, our reservoirs have apparently only increased by a tiny percentage because most of the water has been absorbed by the arid soil. Way to take one for the team, stupid selfish soil!


3. San Franciscans are hilarious when it rains.

There are very few things more amusing than watching San Franciscans trying to deal with actual rainstorms. In New Orleans, it’s not unusual to have torrential downpours dozens of times a year, resulting in several floods. In San Francisco, the “rain” almost always takes the form of a fine mist that takes an entire afternoon to reach just 0.07 inches of accumulation. So when actual rain –the kind with big droplets that make noise when they hit the ground– falls in San Francisco, many people here are poorly equipped to deal with it.

I can certainly sympathize with this kind of reaction to unfamiliar weather phenomena because I, like Douglas, would have absolutely no idea what to do in the snow. I only saw snow once as a child and we had to drive 300 miles north to my grandmother’s house to find it. As soon as we reached the snow, my mom set out a mixing bowl to collect some of it and then mixed it with an entire can of condensed milk to make “snow ice cream.” To this day, that is the only thing that I know about snow – it mixes well with condensed milk. Of course, in my book this puts snow in the select company of every other food item ever discovered, so I really don’t know anything about snow.



Despite that, I do enjoy the schadenfreude of driving around town during an honest-to-God downpour to see how the locals handle it. Today, I saw someone driving in the pouring rain with his wipers and lights turned completely off. He had a GPS that could direct him to the nearest Wi-Fi hotspot to download the song he just heard on his satellite radio to his iPod Shuffle, but he couldn't find the lever to make the windshield stop being wet. Later, when the rain slacked off to a teensy drizzle, a guy pulled up alongside me with his wipers on high speed and his rear wiper going as well. So you see, we run the entire gamut here.

But even more foreign than downpours in San Francisco are the extremely rare occasions when lightning strikes. I have seen lightning exactly three times in San Francisco in the past thirteen years. My friend Steve was driving down Hwy 101 during the lightning strike of 1998 and he said that all of the cars in front of him reacted by locking up their brakes. Apparently, they thought that some giant wizard was invading Silicon Valley and, like in "Jurassic Park," if you hold still it won't eat you. Even better was the lightning strike of 2000 when I was working at a building downtown. Within a few seconds of seeing the flash of light, a group of people in the building next to me ran up to the roof to see what was going on. One of my co-workers tried to yell at them to go back inside, but I put my hand on his arm and said, “It’s not our place to interfere, Harold. Let’s just let nature take its course.” The last lightning strike occurred at night and therefore doesn’t come with its own anecdote, though it did freak out my younger daughter a bit – it was her first time.



So now that we are having another huge rainstorm, I’m awaiting tomorrow’s inevitable headline, “Local man drowns while staring up at sky.” I’m also not looking forward to the obstacle course of toppled eucalyptus trees that I’ll have to negotiate in the morning while driving my kids to school. It turns out that our local foliage is also poorly equipped to deal with storms since eucalyptus trees snap when subjected to particularly strong winds, which apparently includes the farting of nearby Pomeranian puppies. Since our city is not entirely populated by koalas who would consider the fallen eucalipti a tasty buffet, it is actually quite a pain for people who have come to expect their major thoroughfares to be forest-free.

But our local greenery is still probably not as fragile as the psyche of that other Dyer twin who surreptitiously puts bullion cubes and chopped vegetables in his son's bathwater at the first sign of frozen precipitation. So since my daughters read this blog, let me publicly state that I would much rather put up with the inconveniences of our local weather oddities than to move to the frozen tundra of central Alabama where I would be tempted to go all Donner party on them. Don't worry, Sweeties, you're safe... for now.

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