Rain!

Huzzah! We had rain yesterday, real, honest-to-goodness rain! The street gutters were overflowing in small rivers at lunch time, and again when I got home in the afternoon. The trees and bushes in the yard no longer look sad and dry and bedraggled, and when I got up this morning, the ground was still wet! It wasn't enough to get the state out of a drought or extreme fire danger, but it was enough that I don't have to worry about watering for a few days. Ahh...

When I said I wanted rain...

I didn't mean this much, all at once. This is a photo from the National Weather Service, showing how much rain we got on Tuesday. Our house is smack in the middle of the 4-5+ inches of rain. It was a record-breaking day, apparently. One that our roof wasn't quite prepared for - we have a leak in the kitchen, right over the kitchen table. A leaky roof is not one of the joys of home-ownership. We are hoping that we just need to have it patched, and not completely replaced, since the problem seems to be in just one spot.

Sorry to say, I am really not mentally equipped to deal with such problems. Usually, I am a forward thinking feminist, capable of dealing with anything that comes my way, but when something goes wrong with my house or car, I revert. I want my husband to step into the stereotypical gender role and fix it for me. If I had a time machine, I would to go back in time to high school and take shop class and auto mechanics, so that my ignorance of those subjects, which is what makes me freak out, goes away. Yeah, yeah, I could probably take such a class now, but it would have been better back then, before the freaking out. Sigh.

Rain, rain...

I have been complaining about rain lately, because it has been raining so very much here in Arkansas this year. Friends here say, "But you are from Seattle, so you must be used to this." "No," I say, "it doesn't rain like this in Seattle." To prove this, I have done a little research (very little, mostly by Google, meaning, don't use my data in your research papers) into rainfall. Here is what I found.

• Average yearly rainfall for Seattle: 36 or 37 inches (depends on where you look)
• Average yearly rainfall for Little Rock: 48 inches

• So far this year in Seattle: 26.14 inches, + 9.4 inches of snow (unusually high)
• So far this year in Little Rock: 66.36 inches. We have had three months so far with 11+ inches of rain, including October, which has had 14.66 inches. It is still raining today.

As you can see, Little Rock has had almost 3 times as much rain as Seattle this year. But, both of these pale in comparison to some of the rainiest places on earth.

• The Olympic Peninsula in Washington averages 105 inches a year.
• Ketchican, Alaska, the rainiest spot in the continental United States, averages 152 inches.
• The highest average annual rainfall in the world (well, in recorded places anyway) goes to Mt. Waialeale in Hawaii, with 460 inches. (The Wikipedia article mentions another place that gets more, but it is in monsoon struck India - see next point)
  
• The highest amount recorded in one year was in Cherrapunji, India, which had 1042 inches. That is almost 87 feet!
• The highest total in 24 hours was Fac Fac, La Renuion Island, with 72 inches.

So, while we have had a lot of rain this year, and I am sure I will continue to complain about it, it could be a lot worse...