I am not sure how the weather is in Lusaka, Zambia, where one of my regular readers lives, but here in Northern California, we need rain. The clear, cold weather was fine for a while, but the deep freeze a few weeks ago hit the citrus farmers hard, and now I guess its the livestock industry's turn.
This is shaping up to be the driest January on record, which would be OK, if we had a wet fall, but we didn't. The grass in the hills is short and the water holes and stock reservoirs are drying up. Some ranchers are hauling water and hay into the hills to keep their cattle from losing any more weight. These are added expenses that will take most, if not all the profit from the calves at sale time this spring.
El Niño is a tricky thing. Sometimes we get a dry winter and a warm and wet spring. I am hoping for the second part of the equation to get here. The problem with the El Niño rains in the spring is they can come in waves, one after the other, and that can mean flooding. So I guess I will look back at this post when I am bailing out my kitchen in March and remember fondly the dryness of January.
I drove across the causeway the other day and was struck by the parched brownness of the rice stubble below, still unplanted, compared to last year's shimmering floodwaters filling the Yolo Bypass up to the top of the levees. What a difference a year makes in this chronically unstable climate of ours.
According to a report in the SF Chronicle, we're headed for a record dry winter, with Sacramento only at 44 percent of normal and SF at the fifth-driest since 1850 (the San Joaquin Valley is even worse off, at around one-third normal rainfall). The dry air was part of what made the frost so bad in the Central Valley, since the damp air of the usual tule fog tends to insulate trees a bit. Hopefully the late rains won't knock off the almond and apricot blossoms again, and I really hope (knock on wood) that we don't get a pineapple express dumping warm rain on the meager snowpack, putting us more in the hole than we already are.
The dry spell should certainly add a bit of intensity to the current debate in Sacramento over whether to build more reservoirs (Republicans) or enact more conservation measures (Democrats). ... My guess is that we'll probably need a bit of both in the end, but conservation tends to be far more cost-effective a method, water-acre by water-acre, and ought to be tried first, if just to see how much slack we actually need.
One of the maddening things about drought is that you never really know when it begins, and you can't really say you're in one until things really get bad. Especially here in California, where a couple of big, cold storms can restore the snowpack in a week, you end up mumbling to yourself about "if it keeps up like this, this could be a drought," but you don't really know for sure. ... All you can do is sit and wait, and hope that the rain will come in time.
At least they've had plenty of time to keep fixing those levees.
I read someplace that most women will fill up their tanks when they get down to a quarter tank, while most men will wait until they are down to the fumes. I doubt if you can really split us up by gender when it comes to this preference. I myself am a "down to the fumes" woman.
I hate stopping at the gas station. It's depressing. You're outside, it's cold, you're standing around like a dork, spending money on a product that gets pumped right into your tank and that you literally don't lay eyes on. You know what I mean.
So when the warning light comes on, I just take it as a suggestion that it's time to mentally gear up to visit the gas station again soon.
Maybe if I stall long enough, the Rapture will come. And then I can swipe somebody else's car with a full tank.
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