When I look out the window, everything looks lush and green, which, basically, it is. But If you look closer, you’ll see dried-up lawns all over the place, and wet spots on local trails are like, late September levels of dry.
update - I found a map that shows just how dry it really, is, it’s not just localized - we’re down ~3-6" based on the map; because the data is by county and we’re right near a junction of three counties, it’s not terribly localized. But for sure, we need some rain, yo.
Still, the official designation is just Stage 1 (of 7) in terms of drought; but it’s notable that we have reached an official designation. It hasn’t been all fun in the sun though. Thunderstorms have been popping up and slamming down into little spots all over the state, sometimes not for days, but over the weekend we fell into the tropical pattern of hot sun in the morning with thunderstorms in the afternoon.
And yet, for our specific location, ALL the storms seem to have largely missed us, since all the way back to mid-May. Even over the weekend, we went out to an island on the lake and closely monitored the sky to the north:
We could even see lightning for a brief time, and I looked at the radar several times. It was clearly not coming our direction and it sputtered out after a while. But we heard that the area this storm hit saw 1.5" of rain in about 20 minutes. It was nasty, but isolated.
Yesterday, in a different location, we were watching the sky and the radar, and saw this:
We were at the beach on the shore you can see there, near the middle of the picture, and that cell looked like it was coming right for us. The radar confirmed that, so we got packed up and ready to move if we had to. And yet, it broke up and never came. Towns in every direction from us have been hit at least once in the past week. We have seen rain in the distance from our house - twice yesterday alone - and yet, we get nothing.
At home before dinner, the western sky looked menacing:
And yet, the thunder we were hearing was to our north, much closer. Neither storm gave us so much as a single drop of rain.
The next few days are predicted to be littered with pop-up thunderstorms here and there, just like the previous few. I can only hope that we get some rain from one of them; it’s rather amazing we’ve been missed completely for all this time.
It’s strange to think of us as being in a drought. Most things with roots more than 2" deep are doing just fine. Storms are dropping massive quantities of water all over the place. But it reminds me that spot showers are just not the same as a soaking rain from a cold front crossing the entire state.
On the plus side, no rain means the lake level drops and beaches get bigger and bigger! But I think I’d really like some rain.