It rained in Los Angeles today.
Rain? <Princess Bride>Inconceivable!</Princess Bride>
I grew up in Daytona Beach and spent the 90s in Gainesville, Fl. Rain was not unusual. In Daytona it rained like clockwork from 3 to 4 pm pretty much every day for eight or nine months each year. In Gainesville you could wear shorts and a t-shirt to a 9 am class in the blistering sunshine without a cloud in the sky and walk out of that class into a hurricane-force downpour. Rain was … well … if not your “best friend” … it was at least like some guy you see every day and get to know pretty well. Rain was somebody who worked in the same building as you and you saw him every morning in the elevator. Rain was “not unusual”.
Today it rained at most one and a half inches in Los Angeles. In Florida that would warrant something like this on the eleven o’clock news:
“Mostly sunny today with a bit of a drizzle. Tomorrow? Probably gorgeously sunny with a possible torrential thunderstorm. Wear sunscreen and bring an umbrella.”
The weather fellow on the nightly news here was beside himself tonight. I am not kiddding. At least ten minutes of the local NBC affiliate’s thirty-minute eleven o’clock news was concerned with the amazing fact that water fell from the sky in Los Angeles. And people just freak here. An inch of rain will cause hundreds of car accidents. An inch of rain will cause flooding.
On the plus side, though, I never sat next to Elton John in a restaurant in Florida.
I really couldn’t decide how I wanted to write that last sentence. Does it mean that *unfortunately* I never sat next to Elton John in Florida and therefore Florida was *not* as cool as LA? Or does it mean that as a *bonus* to the casual attitude towards rain, I was also never inconvenienced by having to sit next to Elton John? I don’t know. I really like the ambiguity in the way it’s written now, so I’m leaving it that way.
One might think I spend too much time considering how things I write here appear. One would be devilishly incorrect.
You forgot to mention how in LA this is STORM WATCH 2002 and there are reporters on every corner waiting to report to the public when they feel a drop of rain!!! And how there are record SIG alerts on the freeway! LA is a funny place, but I would not trade it for the world!
I do not think that word means what you think it means… 😉
Ob.PrincessBride
When I first moved to California from Florida [I’m now back in Florida], I was laying out the front page of a paper that shall remain nameless.
The executive editor came rushing over all excited. “We have to tear up the page and get a WEATHER story in,” he said. “Weather?” I said. “Where?”
It was drizzling. I couldn’t believe how excited they were. I opined that if you could still see across the street it was not, in fact, rain. 😉
I’ve always thought meteorologists in florida have it so easy during the summer, considering all they have to say is (on the west coast of florida) “partly cloudy with a 60% chance of showers, mainly late in the afternoon (4PM)” EVERY DAY! Except for, of course, your occasional tropical disturbance.
i wish it would rain all the time. really.
*ducking*