So much rain

Seattle is a place that most people think of as rainy, but that's not really true. It's cloudy a whole lot (way too much, really) and drizzle falls reasonably often, occasionally exerting itself to become scattered showers, and once in while really powering up in order to qualify as a good downpour.

September usually gets about an inch and a half of rain. The tail end of summer, it's normally warm and ray and blue skied and pleasant. And it was for most of the start of the month. But the end...well, that was something else. This year, we got close to seven inches of rain, and most of that fell in the last five days of the month. On Saturday, we had more rain than we normally get in the entire 30 days, 1.71 inches.

There's flood watches and warnings in the surrounding areas, and I keep seeing pictures that people are posting of cars up their doors in puddles grown into ponds, of parking lots that are small lakes, of streets become streams. It's not very bad, really: just interesting photos, and a few people in a little bit of trouble, some pretty minor flooding overall. Lucky, that.

I am, in many ways, rather more fortunate even than most: I live on a hill in the center of the city, one that's paved over and bound down by apartment buildings and streets and sidewalks and offices. The rain all runs away downhill from us, and we don't end up with mudslides or falling cliffs or anything. Just wet.

I'm hoping for a drier October, and it will most likely happen, but it might seem wetter. More days of rain, even if there's only sprinkles, give an impression of precipitation all out of keeping with reality. Which is probably how most folks end up thinking of Seattle as rainy in the first place.