Sweet Spot

Usually when the weather forecast says 30% chance of rain and there is no rain either before it or after it we think, yeah no rain for us.  See, usually we are in the dry spot.  They will get rain in Los Molinos, Red Bluff, certainly Chico and we will get to watch, dry.  But this last weekend well, the rain clouds came for us.  I sang my rain thanksgiving song and they must have liked it up there.  Because it rained and rained and rained on us.  It was like the rain from Houston.  It came down in sheets, pounding on our metal roof.  I kept thinking it was so fast and so hard it could not last.  I was wrong.  In a little under three hours we got 2 1/2 inches of rain.  Our pond almost filled, in MAY.  Our little seasonal creek overflowed and covered our road.  All the little waterfalls on our land were running.  The week before this we had to irrigate then our south swale almost overflowed.  Since I had chopped and dropped a huge amount a few weeks before the swale had a lot of absorptive material but even so.  The rain came down so fast and so much that our inner courtyard drain which is open to the sky started to back up.  The whole thing was so surreal.  And then we saw a double rainbow.  The thing that was so strange was since the clouds were right above us, it looked sunny outside but just kept raining.

This is a pic of our entry path overflowing:
 
This is a pic of the rain and the sunshine together:

 
This is a pic of my grey water trench filling with water:
 
And here is the rainbows end:

 
 So for the first time since we have lived out here, we got to be right in the eye of a wonderful rain system- right in the sweet spot.  Chico was dry, and Los Molinos only had a drizzle.  It wasn't even terribly windy and that is just unheard for us with this amount of rain.  Hooray!! The weather might be strange but I am still grateful.