An example of what happens here when it rains

With the country's sports (and other) media focused on Phoenix last week, you may have heard that it wasn't particularly pleasant around these parts. It does occasionally get cold here (the van's doors were frozen shut this morning when I went out to take Mia to school) and it does rain occasionally, despite the 13-year drought. My parents laugh about our water problems, because back in Pennsylvania, if they go three weeks without rain the governments tell the people to start rationing water, while here we can go months without rain and nobody seems to notice. But it did rain last week, and the high temperatures were often in the low 60s, and the media people complained. Such is, as they say, life.

The Sunday before the Super Bowl (so the 27th of January), we were going to go to the zoo with the kids. However, it rained all day. When I say "all day," I mean that there was very little time when it wasn't raining, which is extremely surprising around these parts. Usually, we get sudden and brief downpours, and twenty minutes later it's sunny again. But that Sunday was pretty miserable.

The next day was chilly buy nice, and I took Mia to school. As I drove home, I had to check out McKellips Road, part of which runs ... across the bottom of a river bed. Yes, the road runs across the Salt River, which, of course, is dry 95% or so of the time. But when it rains, you get this:

It's been closed for over a week, too. We had more rain on Monday, and since it's not very warm, the water isn't evaporating as quickly as it does in the summer (I first noticed this last August or September when I was first taking Mia to that school and we had a big storm, but it cleared up pretty quickly). I just love the fact that it rains so little here that they can build a road across the bottom of a river, confident that it will be open 50 weeks out of the year.

That's really all I have to say. It looks cooler when you're driving on the freeway slightly above it, but I can't get a good picture from there. Well, maybe I could, but I'd have to stop in the middle of the freeway, and that might get a bit messy.