Winter in the Desert

We've been sleeping with the bedroom window open.  Most places, you do that in the spring and the summer, but here, when the temps reach the 90's by April, winter is the only time that fresh air feels good in the middle of the night.

It's hard to feel Christmas-y when the temperature is in the 70's; all my winter sweaters are vacuum packed away, waiting for a trip to the kids in Chicago.  I was lucky enough to have cool weather on the 25th; I could wear my new sweater to JannyLou's for dinner and not feel that I was pushing the season.  Of course, I didn't need a jacket to walk next door, either.

Winter's our second rainy season, plumping up the succulents and the cacti.  For those of us who have placed containers strategically beneath the downspouts, there will be no need to drag out the watering can this week.

The downside of this free watering is the mess on the side of the pots.

The rain comes in fast and furious

  pushing the blue sky away ahead of the front.

The sun tries to maintain a presence

but the clouds are immutable.

And then, as quickly as it begins, it's over.

In the time it took me to write a post, to lose the post to a weather-induced-internet-outage which precluded saving my work, and to rewrite something you could read (stifling my groans along the way), we went from raindrops to the makings of a beautiful sunset.

There are many things you can say about the desert.

Boring is not one of them.