As they say, be careful what you wish for. In this case, I’m referring to the rain. It’s been raining, on and off, since Sunday. After 182 days without any precipitation, the skies have opened and the flood appears on its way.

Sorry…been studying a lot of Bible stuff for Jeopardy! and it seems to be sneaking into my rhetoric. Just as long as it leaves my ethos alone…

Anyway, it is raining, and raining heavily at times. There are also fairly significant winds, which have turned the sidewalks around here into strange, palm-induced obstacle courses with fruits, seeds, and even whole fronds strewn everywhere.

The cats are totally confused. They keep nagging to go out and when I finally open the door they run outside…only to beg to come back in almost immediately, and with looks I swear mean “What the hell have you done to my outside? It’s all wet! I don’t know how, but it’s your fault. Now my fur is all mussed and I’ve got to lick myself dry. I’m blaming that on you too. In fact, I’m going to go curl up, wet, on your pillow and lick myself there. So there.”

About an hour later, this repeats.

For the rest of the city, as I predicted, it has made driving a nightmare. Usually, San Diego gets about 55-65 accidents a day, which in my mind is a big plenty already. Sunday through Tuesday, there were well over 600. Because driving here is usually crazy, I have bookmarked this traffic site so that I can check it before I have to drive any distance. Now, it’s pretty much lit up like a Christmas tree most of the time (click on “Incident Report” for details direct from the CHP—normally, when it’s not raining, you’ll find an amazing number of stupid human tricks on that list, i.e.,“pedestrian on roadway”). People just utterly forget that you can’t drive the usual 90+mph when there is standing water with a nice film of six months of oil on top on the roads. Go fig.

Quite possibly the strangest thing about this rainstorm is that it may snow in the mountains. It’s snowing in Reno now, apparently, but that’s up north. The fact that it may snow here, less than 100 miles east of here, when it was in the 80s a week ago in the same location and it’s still in the upper 60s, at least, here. That ain’t right to my Midwestern mind.

Second strangest thing: the weather folk said we might actually hear thunder here in the city. Yeah, you read that right: it is a big deal here if we hear thunder, at all, in the distance. Apparently the world might end if we actually had lightning and thunder within the city; I’m not quite sure of the official rules on that. Again, the Midwesterner in me is much confused. I grew up in the land of summer gully-washers and tornadoes, but it’s been about a year since I’ve heard thunder (and then only once, very distantly). Last time I saw lightning was on my drive out here in late July, 2003.

At least the rain does make it easier to sit inside with my piles of index cards and study. Taping is two weeks from today…