If you look at the US weather map, there’s a big red blot over North Texas (headed for Oklahoma I think) with a “tail” that extends across Central Texas and angles across Mexico.\u00a0 The big red blot used to be on top of Central Texas.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s full of thunder and lightning and rain and little lumps of hail.\u00a0\u00a0 It thunder-bumped most of the night, and every time I relaxed into deep sleep because the noise was only rain (Yay rain!)\u00a0 another embedded lump of noise and flashing lights woke me up.<\/p>\n
Not exactly the restful night’s sleep I was hoping for before driving to San Antonio today and having the meet-and-greet thing in late afternoon.\u00a0\u00a0 However…though I’ve had weather in the recent books, maybe I haven’t had enough weather.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Yes,\u00a0 snow and sleet.\u00a0 Yes, rain.\u00a0\u00a0 But\u00a0 what about a meeting of weather fronts, such as we get here in Texas (and elsewhere in the Great Plains states)…where large air masses collide, play slip-and-slide above and under one another and light up the night sky with garish displays while dumping (in those record moments) 20+ inches of rain on someone within 24 hours?\u00a0\u00a0 A nice dramatic flash flood.<\/p>\n
Nothing quite so dramatic has gone on here this time.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But we (using we broadly to mean the area of Central Texas where this happens) do hold national records for rainfall intensity.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 People get used to the dry gulches, the low-water crossings, and then…if they’re not careful…they’re peering out the windshield into dark-and-too-bright, in rain too heavy for windshield wipers to deal with, and they don’t see the rushing water until they’re being swept off the bridge and tumbled downstream.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Why shouldn’t that happen to, say, someone’s supply train?<\/p>\n
Writer looks at map, considers the configuration of land and air masses that creates our weather,\u00a0 and shakes her head.\u00a0 Nope.\u00a0\u00a0 Drat.\u00a0\u00a0 Did not think of designing Central Texas storm systems when designing the map.\u00a0 Can’t happen.\u00a0 Other storms can (and do, and will) but the particular combination of shapes, distances from sources of moist air masses, etc. etc.\u00a0 doesn’t exist here.<\/p>\n
Too bad.\u00a0 For a moment there I had a very cinematic vision of someone’s entire invading army who had used a gulch to sneak along in being tumbled in amongst branches, rocks,\u00a0 stretches of barb-wire fence…no, wait, no barbed wire fencing in Paksworld.\u00a0 SIGH.<\/p>\n
And it’s after 8:30 am, so I must away for the last bits of packing & stuff.\u00a0 The weather along the I-35 corridor is frightful, I know there’s construction and other delays going through Austin…so I’m not going through Austin.\u00a0 I’m going west, to take another road down, but have been informed that it has construction in progress where it meets San Antonio’s outer ring road, 1604.\u00a0\u00a0 But it has higher ground, and is not covered in thunderstorms from here to there, as 35 is.\u00a0\u00a0 And its bridges over rivers are higher.<\/p>\n
R- reports we got over 2 inches and the new big tanks both have over 1000 gallons in them now, while all existing tanks at house and barn are full (had collected some from previous rains.)\u00a0\u00a0 Last weekend’s work in putting up the second big new tank was definitely worth it.<\/p>\n
So I’m off, and won’t be back until…um…Monday night, probably.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Without the netbook, I can’t post from San Antonio.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If you look at the US weather map, there’s a big red blot over North Texas (headed for Oklahoma I think) with a “tail” that extends across Central Texas and angles across Mexico.\u00a0 The big red blot used to be on top of Central Texas.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s full of thunder and lightning and rain and little […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,5],"tags":[112,107],"class_list":["post-1500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-beyond-writing","category-the-writing-life","tag-life-beyond-writing","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1500"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1500"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1500\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1502,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1500\/revisions\/1502"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}