Weather, weather everywhere....

In Kansas, you can see weather coming for miles and miles. In Stratford, if you see any sort of clouds around the mountain, you know it's going to rain in some degree. I found this article that explains it rather nicely.

Mountains make a barrier for moving air. The wind pushes air, and clouds  in the air, up the mountain slopes. The atmosphere is cooler at high elevations, and there is less of it: lower pressure makes it hard for lowland animals to get enough air to breathe. Dense masses of warm, moist air that move up and over a mountain swell as the air pressure confining them drops away. The air becomes colder in the same way as a pressurized spray can's contents become colder when the can's pressure drops rapidly. (The phrase that describes this phenomenon is adiabatic expansion.) Water that existed as a gas under the high pressure and temperature  of the flatlands now condenses into cool droplets, and clouds form over the mountain. As the cloud continues to rise, droplets grow and grow, eventually becoming too heavy to float in the air. The clouds dump rain, and snow, on the mountain slopes. After topping the crest, however, the clouds may have no more moisture to rain on the other side of the mountain, which becomes arid. This rain shadow is best illustrated in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, where the  tall Redwood Forests cover the ocean-facing side of the mountains and Death Valley lies in the rain shadow.

               from     Mountains - Weather Effects Of Mountains


I first thought this whole weather thing would be a problem and make hanging clothes on the line a bit tricky. Then I realized that the neighbors didn't seem to care what the weather was--they just hung clothes out whenever they were moved. So the conclusions I found were these:

• If I look out all the windows and see even a small patch of blue anywhere, the clothes should eventually get dry today. 
• The rain is so fine on this side of the mountain that it doesn't hinder the drying process to any degree unless it's blowing sideways. [Sometimes, it's pleasantly balmy and I don't realize it's actually raining (misting, we used to call it) until I get outside.]
• Except for the dreaded winter months, the rain is always intermittent--the blue skies and sunshine can break through the clouds 10 times over a period of a few hours, interrupted by some mist or drizzle or having both sunshine and rain simultaneously.
• Even if the clothes don't get dry today, they will be nicely rinsed in pure, mountain rainwater and will dry tomorrow.

I have learned not to worry about the laundry. And I have, thus, learned not to worry about many things over which I have no control. Life is always a learning process.

Raindrops on roses....

OK, it's not a rose, but it's still pretty cool, isn't it?!

After being housebound with a bug and two days of rain, I took the first opportunity I had to go outside and take some pics!

This lupin shows how fine the raindrops are.

Here is the bloom of a groundcover I picked out last year. Unfortunately, I have no inkling of it's name.


This is the huge white calla lily along the pond's drainage ditch that gets bigger every year!

It never crossed my mind

I amuse myself a lot these days by doing things I never thought about before.

I had my little boring routine in Holton, Kansas, and it served me well since I had no one else in the house to worry about or work around. I cleaned when I wanted, I washed and dried my one or two loads of clothes each week, cooked and baked when I felt moved, slept as long as I desired. It was perfect for one person.

Today, I hung clothes out in the rain. The fact that I actually hang clothes on a huge, rotating station in the back garden ['yard' for you yankees] is something that never crossed my mind in Holton. I just put the clothes in the washer and then the dryer and then put them away like everybody else, I assume. But here, I rarely use the dryer--mostly because not much is that urgent to be dried plus the dryer is in the shed ['garage' for you yankees] because laundry rooms don't usually have outlets for dryers, so it's not exactly convenient. But, since I'm a lady of leisure now, I really don't mind hanging clothes out. The slower pace of life allows for the time it takes and they get that 'fresh' smell to them.

And now I shall explain why I'm not crazy because I hang clothes in the rain.

Rain here is much finer than any I have ever encountered in the States, whether it was Georgia or Kansas. It is so fine that, most of the time, it doesn't even make raindrop puddles in the pond or any sound at all on the plastic sunroom roof. The patio deck being wet is a dead give away, but sometimes, I only know it's raining because I look up at the trees and see it falling against the dark shades of the leaves and I'm amazed at how much rain is really falling without notice. So I find that, even with the rain coming down, the clothes will get dry in a few hours.

We do have stormy rain with pelting drops on the odd occasion, but that is usually at night. And thunderstorms are very rare here. I'm told it's all because of the mountain being between us and the ocean, but I will just take their word for that.