The Steel Gray Of The River On A Cloudy Day

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The POV for this one was just above a short stretch of Willamette River left bank in the shadow of the Marquam Bridge called "Poet's Beach", and the color of the clouds reflected on the water caused the Brown Eyed Girl to exult about the steel gray color of the river water.

There are things about our individual worlds that can't compare to others'. For those of us who grew up in the Willamette Valley, the quality of the light here during days like this is like cloudy days nowhere else in the world; little wonder a great many of us act like Oregon (and particularly northwestern Oregon) invented the cool, cloudy day. But there's something to it, outside of parochial chauvinism; at least one of the actors in the series Grimm mentioned that the particular light of our area gave the production a certain feel it couldn't get elsewhere, like it was a character unto itself.

So, we get steel-gray rivers under torn, cloudy skies like nowhere else in the world, really, and it's not really an idle boast. This sort of light is the light that brings artists from elsewhere.

[liff in OR] Portland In The Time Of Flood

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The counter on the Acu-Rite weather droid for rain, while I do love this little guy, is flawed. It doesn't reset itself after the water year ends. It also appears to top out at 99.99 inches. After I snapped this, I cleared the totals … you can only clear all … so we're starting out again. This was the view on Tuesday morning:

It defines rain 'events' differently than our weather broadcasters do, and it's a little inscrutable, but over this historic weekend, when sewage gouted out manhole covers in The Pearl, when Johnson Creek rose 1.6 feet in one hour on Monday morning, when Detroit Reservoir rose 17 feet in a single day, we saw 6.04 inches of rain at the Chez ZehnKatzen.

With 8.7 inches we are now statistically over the rainfall we'd expect to get in a December, and I call the rain to a halt for this month. It can all go straight to the mountains as snow.

I have spoken.

[liff in Cascadia] Weathering the PDX Winter Like A Native

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It's just water, people.

Reed College … giving away our secrets, yo.