Flowers (R)

One Day at a Time

The night air smells like flowers. A bit like honeysuckle but I’m pretty sure the honeysuckle hasn’t bloomed yet. That’s a summer flower. So it can’t be honeysuckle. But it’s flowers, and it smells nice. It’s everywhere in the air. I smelled it when I left the store and I smelled it during my entire run. I guess the atmosphere is stirred up at the moment so it can be smelled. I thought I smelled rain too, but there’s no rain out there. We haven’t had more than a trace or two of rain since April 5, when we got a major storm that dumped a half inch, left thousands without power, and uprooted trees, and generally left debris everywhere. And, there’s no more than an isolated shot at rain/thunderstorms for the next 10 days. Looking to be a dry April overall. March was quite wet. I’m really quite pissed about it. If I had wanted to live in a desert, then by God that’s where I’d live. I don’t, so I live here. I must have so much anger inside me to get pissed at something so silly as the weather not suiting me . . . I can’t control it, you know. So I have to let it go. It will do what it’s going to do. I understand that Texas is having major problems, wildfires and stuff. I think we are quite a ways away from drought yet (unlike the folks out there), since we had good rain this past winter, and then at the end of march/beginning of April. The problem is the midwest, the midsouth, and the midatlantic (Missouri, Illinois, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia) keep getting pounded with every round of storms but we are too far south, so we miss out. Jet stream is too far north and it’s steering all the storms north of us. If this pattern keeps up I don’t see much rain for us until the summer when perhaps we’ll get daily convective thunderstorms from all the heat and humidity.

I just looked up the stats. Average March rainfall here is 5.01inches. It’s our wettest month, on average. Our actual rainfall this past March (last month) was 6.73inches. For April, we have only gotten 0.52inches, but should expect 3.10inches for the month. April is one of our driest months. I thought November was the driest month, but some sources show April as being our driest month. Tell me, how do you get your wettest and driest month of the year back to back like that?  I’m a student of weather (and the natural sciences in general), so I’m just trying to understand. What happens when March becomes April so suddenly to force the change? Jet stream? That could be it. Usually by April the jet stream has retreated our region, so it means the storms rarely pass through here anymore. And as I said, I guess the rain picks back up again in May and June due to convective thunderstorms as the weather is more consistently hot and humid.

Good run.

-AR

2.40 miles (3.86 km) through Millbrook, Amelia Landing, and points north. Start time approximately 10:45 PM EDT on 04/21/2011. Total run time 20:26. Pace 8:30. Weather Conditions: Partly Cloudy, 69F/21C, Dew Point 57F, Humidity 65%, Winds ENE 10mph, 30.16inHg/1021.3mbar and steady.