Weather Doings and Ancestral Ghosts

After a blazing August, with several weeks of temperatures above 105 F and the near-record of 108.3 F in our backyard, we now have overnight temps in the 50s, daytime highs in the low 70s, and, last night and this morning, a burst of needed rain!

It feels great; wonderful, fall weather. Just what I needed to make me stay indoors, work on the house, grade papers, and all the other little chores that all the mild sunny days of last week pushed away.

Overnight, as of 6:30 am today, we have had .71 inches of rain according to my little backyard weather station. Looking at the weather radar we should get hit with another ran cell in about 10 minutes. The last couple of cells that headed this way veered off to the west toward Glendale at the last minute, but I think this one has our name on it.

I took a moment during the lull (and in light of the impending rain cell) to pop outside and check on things in the backyard. I always miss putting something away for the first storm, but I sure didn't see anything this time. I'm sure something sodden will show up later though. (Grin.) Just the way it seems to work.

In any case, I find I am compelled to point out that to see current live-weather from under our Moontree, just look at the little box on the right margin of the blog. That's what's happening right now -- or at most a couple of seconds ago -- just outside our door.

To see more, there are two additional ways to check into the weather in our yard: (1) Go to the main Pasadena weather page at weatherunderground.com, then scroll way down, find Madison @ Mountain and click on "Make this my default location." Then when you go to the Pasadena map, you will get our weather on the top of the page, and the history of all the area stations at the bottom. Or you can go direct to our very own cool graphs page, which has 24 hour graphs of observations, links to weekly and monthly graphs and data, and a live feed box too.

I have spent all this time on the weather observations because that was precisely the sort of thing various of my grandparents, great-grandparents and one great-grand-aunt did when they made their own daily observations of their doings on their kitchen calenders and diary books. It's sort of a family tradition.

In fact, although my father and grandfathers are all deceased, I can't help but think they would be tickled by this technology. I can imagine my Dad sending me an IM bragging that the weather up on his hill was more interesting than mine down here in the flatlands of Pasadena; I can imagine long chats with my Grandfather Blumer about the underlying workings of this new technology, and the vagaries of the micro-climates you can spot on an area map of all the stations in Pasadena.

I imagine, even if the rest of our family is not currently living in town, that they might check-in from time to time, just to see what's happening here. I'm not really sure why they would want to do that, but it comforts me to know that they can -- and just might.

Ahh. Here comes the rain I was expecting.

Time for a coffee warm-up; why don't you click on over and have a peek in our backyard. It's good to know you're there.

..............

UPDATE: 7:30 AM raintotal up to 1.06 inches, and the rain has moved on.