Seriously, I don't know if I can adequately express how strange our weather has been lately... But I will try.
First let me say this: Fairbanks is technically in a 'desert' region. A very cold desert, but a desert, none the less. Our humidity is VERY low...
For the past couple weeks we've been having an odd 'evening rain'. Every night around 5 or 6 pm we've had a downpour rivaling some of the rain dumps I experienced in Texas. Nothing else is quite like it- Like God took a bucket or barrel of water and just turned it over. In Fort Worth there would be three-five inches of water standing on the highway in about 10 minutes. Crazy. Plus Fairbanks has had thunder & lightning, which is rather rare up here... I remember almost an entire high school football team getting struck by lightning while I was in seminary... Beautiful clear day and something like 8 guys are struck by lightning and killed. Absolutely insane, but apparently not unheard of in the Fort Worth area. I had never heard of anything like that before I moved down there. Now we are seeing quite a bit of lightning over our skies...
I'm from Oregon- lived there for my first 10 years, plus I lived in Seattle for several years recently. I KNOW rain, not quite in the Biblical sense, but I am very familiar with the vocabulary of rain. I know many words to describe rain- spitting, drizzling, sprinkling, sheeting, pouring... you get the idea. (side note: The Inupiaq Eskimos around Kotzebue where I lived for a while have approximately 100 words to describe different kinds of snow... Wow. I guess snow has been more central to their lifestyle than rain has been to mine...)
The rain we've been having here is crazy and very unlikely for our area... Just dumping buckets. Raining cats and dogs. For the last 3 summers we've had terrible forest fires in the area. I'm hoping that all this rain prevents some of those, at least...
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