Weather

The Real Face of Summer

Summer, the season of death, has arrived.

Days of The Lie

Even before global warming, July days were the time of the lie.

Swerving Thermometer

Are the comparitively large error margins a new thing or has this been happening before?

A Small Storm

Today it rained.

The Day After Tomorrow

Fire or ice? The promos for this film suggest both.

The Bottom of A Lake

This morning, I could have been a catfish mucking around in the bottom of an asphalt lake, looking up at the inverted water sky.

Splash Wednesday

As I dropped down El Toro into Laguna Woods, the star-ticked streets of the foothill suburbs spread from right to as far left as the advancing wall of rain where they disappeared.

Misery

After spending two hours outside of the house, I need a good ablution.

Snow Days

I've often told Lynn that Californians believe that snow is something that you go to visit on holiday weekends. A storm passed though on Friday and dumped a load on our higher peaks.

Santa Ana

I was suffocating

so I opened the window a slit

no larger than a cat's lit pupil.

Splat!

The rain on the streets is as dark as the goo in the La Brea Tarpits tonight.

An Early Foehn

The wind howls and the trees shake their fists at it while it passes.

Mist, Rain, and Spin

A brown haze has parked itself on the alluvial plain beneath Portola Hills.

Letting the Weather Choose

Dark clouds hovered in indecision today.

Word of an Attack on America

Here in our nation at war, in this neighborhood only ten miles from the Pacific Ocean where the sampans and the dhows could land and end our freedom forever, sabotaging clouds bombarded us with spikes of rain.

Ice Blue and Indigo

Crumbled clouds smeared the face of the moon.

RAIN!

I heard water. Water that I first suspected was flowing from a hose as it dribbled off the decks.

A Hawk and Smoke

The only creature I saw other than tiny lizards at Whiting on my walk yesterday was a lone red-tailed hawk.

Fogbound
Note: This is part of a series based on exercises from A Writer's Book of Days. It's something of a...

Frostless at Midnight

The cop cars at John Wayne Orange County Airport reflected the bland orange mocha lamp shine. The burning metropolis jumped up and left its singe in the sky.

Rain

I wish the air was heavy with the explosive scent of the dust stirred up by the pregnant droplets bouncing off the earth.

Air Conditioning!
We have refrigeration! This calls for a celebratory nap!...

Air Conditioner Insider

I wish I was an air conditioning industry insider.

Expectations of Unfolding

Though the heat declines in intensity and we're supposed to have rain, I still feel the soft-cratered spiritual morbidity in my temples and above my eyes.

Blanched Almonds and Sugar-Thin Ash

Yes, I find peace in writing about the weather.

Burnt Off

A slight breeze came out of somewhere and raked the air so clean that I could make out the individual shrubs on the hillsides two miles away.

Melting like Gumby

The bright guy is still around, but he's moving around like Gumby. And Gumby's melting.

Thunder and Boomerang Clouds

The atmosphere threw bluish-orange boomerang clouds at the Santa Ana Mountains.

AC Man

When I saw him dragging himself up the stairs, his skin blown dry like the sandstone ridges that jut out of the hillsides around these parts, I offered him a cold Coke.

Return of the Air Conditioner

As those who saw the pictures I displayed of my immediate environs know, we've been having light cloud cover.

Relief

The Heat of Two Suns

The heat of the sky's sun and of my inner sun broiled me thoroughly today.

Still, Hot

There's no wind blowing from the mountains and this bodes poorly.

Heat

The interior of the house radiates inwardly, making it tough to sleep, tough to think.

Bluing and the Talking Mountain

It's stupid, trite, to sum this up by saying that summer is here, burning us, but there you have it.

Can We Trust the Air Quality Reports?

Is it just me or have I hit on yet another distortion by the corporate media?

Micro-Climate

While we were away celebrating my aunt's 95th birthday, it rained here.

Metallic Cloud

A car sounding like an approaching storm front -- rain on the edge -- passes.

Boil-up and Cool-down

In the heat of the afternoon, somewhere between Los Angeles and Hawaii, the uppermost tenth of a millimeter of the Pacific boiled up.

Haze

A light haze blindfolded vista seekers today.

It's NOT Snowing

Balls of cotton halved and quartered dropping from the sky allude to the warmth of red clay fields, fat for the harvest, under the sun of late summer.

Weekend Forecast

It will not be a good weekend to go to the beach.

Snow Fall

Three days of enclosure started my heart to strum a dull, jabbing beat on my rib cage. My legs protested "We want to move!" Thus, I came to the moment when I knew I could not sit through another minute of that listless white noise.

Bottom Side Now
I went outside for a short time in the early evening. The clouds looked like the unfinished bottoms of dinnerware...

Dream
In the waking world, a Santa Ana blows. It rattles the electric blue tarps which were laid on the roof...

Alternate Realities of Water

Snow is just an alternate reality of water, the stuff that has been coming down here hard all day.

California Winter 2

The weather here has started to feel like a Maine summer.

California Winter

California winters are bright green and wet.

A Favorite Moment

When the clouds break and the sun streaks out over the Spanish tile rooftops of Portola Hills.

From the Scarlet Hermitage

The main thing keeping me home isn't pain, but the fact that if I go charging around town, pumping my heart, the wound in my mouth is about to bust.

Rain

You didn't know it, but I was getting impatient for rain

Severe Storm Warning 3

It will be a wise thing, today, to watch the ridgeline, check the news, and listen for the blast of the fire engine speakers telling us to grab what we love and leave our homes.

Severe Storm Warning 2

The last drones of the high winds which have ripped out trees like tweezers snagging eyebrow hairs boom and bustle outside.

Cordwood

Last night, the dry storm blew down a hefty liquid amber.

Severe Storm Warning

Earlier they said that the gusts blew over 45 mph and were worst in the foothills. Like we needed to be told that.

Foehn

The roar and whistle is so loud, I can barely hear the leaf blowers the gardeners are using in a vain attempt to put back the leaves the clear storm had shorn off the trees.

Blackout

One word -- Fuck! -- pushed forward from my mouth and, for a second, seemed to make everything flash on again.

Atop Portola Hills

We got to this middling time when the air is still, the skies clear, there's a hint of warmth in the air, and yet I need a slightly thicker shirt or sweater.

Storm Break

The clouds which lay upon the hilltop like gigantic leaking sponges drained themselves dry. All that was left above were ripped remnants of the storm.

Adventure in the Rain

It wasn't just raining: we were dead center in the precipitating cloud.

Near Immersion

If I went outside right now, I think I'd need an aqualung.

Rupture and Reflection

Poor Blaz. He left just before things got good here.

Cool and Dry

I ought to crack one of those weather guides and learn something. I want to know how to milk clouds.

Valyermo - Approach and Retreat

I checked the roofs of oncoming cars to see if people had lashed personal belongings to them....Caltrans called the halt to weld in a new guardrail, not to evacuate Wrightwood.

Post-Equinox

Today the clouds looked like the fluff that the cats pull from the rug or off their scratching post. Some great sky tiger scattered the stuff over the entire seaboard between the Peninsular Range and the sea.

Season of the Dragon

A few weeks from now, the first drops of rain will pierce the hard-baked crust left over from summer and bathe the woody roots of the pallid scrub that clump along the sandstone spines and domes of Whiting Canyon like fresh hair implants on a stark scalp.

The AC Saga

Insurance will cover the most brutal of the costs, but we have to pay the taxes, get a new programmable thermostat (I'll try to talk the insurance into buying this and save us $85), and carry the old flutter box to the dump.

Invisible Rain

When I stepped out onto the deck this afternoon, I caught the faintest whiff of rain.

The AC Saga

One little neuron wakes up finally, takes note of our problem, fires off, and all the desks, workstations, carpets, telephones, plate glass windows, and potted plants sympathize.

The AC Saga Continues

You'd think that this would have made their records, but I had to run through the whole story all over again.

AC Insurance

I suspect that if I fight for it, I will get my air conditioner fixed in time for next summer.

Labor Day

While others howled about the baseball strike, I merely asked for the rest of the story: what about the toilet scrubbers, the counter clerks, and the groundskeepers?

Burning

When a Texan looks at your weather and gasps "That's hot!" it's time to take notice.

The Heat's On

September is the time of oppressive days cloaked in charring fogs. You get the gloom of winter and the worst of summer's sweltering rages.

AC Repairman
I've got the AC repairman over here at last, plugging off portions of my cooling system and pressurizing them to...

Nothing quite this dramatic

The actual rainfall or fog drip barely wet the sidewalks. No puddles stand in the aftermath of our August storm.

No Freon

First they left messages. Then, when she called them back, their receptionist told Lynn to "just wait" for them to get around to getting back to us again: she couldn't find the papers.

A Lethargy

The present heat wave burns everything good from my brain.

Watching for the Red Storm

You can't see this heat. It show up uneventfully and squats.

Summer Mist
A fog lifted from the sea has drifted inland and stayed awhile atop the hill where we live. A bank...

Heat

The breezes that moved the trees and cooled nothing on Wednesday have paused.

Hot Times

It's nearly August and the cry goes out across the land "It's too damn hot!"

Passed Over

It can be frustrating when the hills are dessicated by the drought to watch so much water being shipped East to places where they really don't want it.

Flight from Heat and Unsaid Advice to the Young

Before the sun can turn my condo into a broiler, I get in my truck and glide down the hill to Tully's, to spend my afternoon writing to old Sixties and Seventies tunes.