It's Raining!

This week started out absolutely beautiful, weather wise. After a weekend of high winds and a week before of up and down temps where one day you're in your shirt sleeves and the next looking for a sweater, Monday dawned as the perfect day. Sunshine, no wind, blue skies, fresh air, birds singing, and a nice warm but not too hot day. Windows were opened and porches were sat on.

Then we watched the weather report and found out that we were in for some rain this week. I know that in other parts of the country rain is not a momentous occasion, but here in the desert it is. And when they say the chance of rain is 100%, you can almost guarantee that the rain will actually fall. Kind of, anyway. It did rain during the night and it's kind of sprinkly right now and the ground is wet. More rain is supposed to come in the next few days.

You can tell that it's been a very dry winter when you get on the interstate and drive through the mountains. We did see some California poppies on the hills by Lebec, but no other wildflowers were blooming and the hills were as brown as they are during the hottest days of summer, no green to be seen anywhere.

We took a little drive on Saturday, too, out to Murray Family Farms on the road to Tehachapi. That is where I first noticed that the usually green hills of spring were dull brown. We wanted to bring a little thank you gift down to Bruce and Carolyn on Easter and were trying to think of something to bring that was not the usual bouquet of flowers or bottle of wine. We don't drink wine and don't know what's good so didn't want to try and pick out a decent wine and in hindsight it's probably good that we didn't bring more wine to the party since Keith's ex wife would probably have latched onto the bottle. For me?!? We went to the farmer's market to see if anyone was selling local jams or some other gift type thing but the farmer's market was a little sparse and nobody was selling jam.

So, we drove the 30 minutes or so out to Murray Farms because I knew they sell jam there. We get there and see the parking lot absolutely packed with cars and a young man was directing traffic into a very bumpy field to park and I realized that we picked the absolute worst weekend to visit Murray Farms because it's Easter and they have a big Easter egg hunt and hay rides and bouncy houses and Easter crafts and all kinds of other stuff for families with small children to do.

We waited in line for about 10 minutes to buy some jam. The jam does have Murray Family Farms labels on them but in reading them further they may have been packed by Smuckers for all I know because the label just says 'packed for Murray Farms'. But the labels are cute and you can't get Murray Farms jam in Ventura as far as I know and hopefully they like jam, because who doesn't like jam, right?

Anyway, the point of my story is that it's raining today and maybe the rain will help the wildflowers to bloom and the hills to turn green.