Look! Water!

For the last couple weeks there have been signs of the upcoming monsoon season. I have to say that although the summer heat is almost unbearable here, the monsoon season during July and August is rather exciting. Every afternoon we see these huge billowing clouds in the distance. They look like they are coming up from the earth. Kind of like this: (I didn't take this picture)

Then the wind kind of picks up and we might see some clouds coming our way that look like they might bring rain....usually they don't. Although I have been noticing rain off in the distance like this:

Well, yesterday was no exception. After dinner, around 7:15 I left my house, with my friend Marie-elena for our usual walk down the road. It was cloudy and grey and looked like rain, but we have been walking in this weather for several days and didn't think anything of it. We got a couple blocks from my house, on our way to meet up with our other friend, Ani, who was walking towards us and we felt a couple rain drops. No big deal. In fact we thought it was kind of fun. Yay. Some rain to keep us cool. (We're parched here in the desert) It was only minutes before the couple of rain drops turned into a full on downpour. We kind of started laughing, like wow, we are really getting wet. And then came harder rain, wind and lightning. Oh dear. This is starting to hurt. So we started sprinting to Ani's house to get out of the storm. We flew into her front door dripping wet. We looked like we had fallen into the pool or something. We went onto her back patio (covered patio) to drip dry and watch the rain. It continued to get worse as the rain just dumped and settled on the ground (no soaking into the ground here in the desert. There aren't even storm drains....just washes that turn into raging rivers in minutes.) Ani drove us home and there was literally rivers on the road. Lightening, and thunder crashed for several hours. It was pretty crazy. The thunder was shaking the walls in the house and the lightening would flash continuously for several seconds so that it looked like a light switch had been turned on in the sky.

(I didn't take this one. Wish I did, but I didn't.)

This morning it is still grey and cloudy and kind of dark. It is only 75 degrees! That's quite cool for this time of year.

So, this is monsoon season. Sct. T-Storms in the forecast for the next week.

You'd never know this morning, that last night there was a river running down the road at the end of my driveway.

Still pretty brown out there.