Rain! Glorious Rain!

I would like to dedicate this blog posting to discussing one of the world's oldest topics: the weather.

We've been in Juarez for nearly six months now and before today, I've seen it rain once. To be fair, I've seen evidence of rain a few times. It's not hard to tell that it rained overnight, which is when it usually happens, as the Juarez streets flood after so little as .25 of an inch of precipitation. This is because there are no storm drains (or drainage of any type) and the surface water drainage strategy is based solely upon the process of evaporation. Which happens pretty quickly in the desert, so I guess you can't really fault the city planners in saving a few bucks, right? But in the meantime, these occasional lakes cause hazards and hide things like unfilled ditches, curbs, rebar, fence posts, potholes, small children perhaps...

But today it started out overcast and sprinkling as I walked to work, turned into a light and steady rain by lunchtime, and ended in a healthy deluge by late afternoon. I never thought I'd be celebrating a rainy day so much! Especially after one year in year in Bogota where I relished that one day we had with completely blue skies (I still remember it was New Year's Day, as seen here.) And after many years in the Pacific Northwest, a sunny day was something to be cherished indeed. 

So then we move to the northern Chihuahua desert and for the first month or so, I opened my curtains to the daily wonder of cerulean horizons. Again! 

This is what it usually looks like:

And this is what constitutes a Juarez "partly cloudy day" (grab a jacket):

And finally, this is an overcast day (might as well be winter):

But summer time is actually our wet season, and so today I am delighted to report that there was water falling from the sky - for free! Clean, fresh water, not the tired, slightly salty stuff that we squeeze out of distant aquifers deep underground. I'm excited to see the damp and our applicants wearing their coats in July and ducking their heads and darting in from the outdoors to our interview waiting room. The garden, the lawn, the animals, the bushes - how relieved they must be. In the next pictures, you can even see that the sky is actually gray, that the trees are kinda' blowing in the wind that brought the storm in, that Toby, well, he's not about to go outside now, and that our neighborhood park now has a swimmin' hole.

I'm loving it, and I know that the desert and our little garden will be transformed:

C'mon Mother Nature!