Weather

The weather tonight is wild. I'm assuming it's hurricane runoff. I don't think I've ever directly experienced winds this strong in this area before. Not directly. These winds are like at playa-strength. Except they're a lot more intimidating because they're louder, what with all the trees around. Around here, you hear the wind, and it freaks you out, because it /sounds/ strong. Out there, on the playa, you don't hear the wind so much as you just feel it and know exactly how strong it is.

In addition to the wind, the standing air temperature is pretty warm (it felt perfect - truly perfect, the combination of heat and humidity (neither one too strong but both palpable) - before sunset). Even now, it remains in the high 70's, hours after sunset. Although, with the heavy and constant wind, it feels a little chillier than that, unfortunately. The full moon is also out, and despite heavy cloud cover, it has a tendency to peek out between cloud banks as the wind pushes them rapidly across the sky - and the full moon is bright enough that at times, when it peeks out between those clouds, you could believe (and I did, at least once) that somebody had turned a light on!

The power's been fluctuating a little tonight. It hasn't gone off, but it did - just now - fluctuate enough to reset my computer (though not enough to reset the clocks). In fact, it happened a second time while I was logging back in... There was some lightning that I saw, although it was very unusual. I didn't see the bolts, and it looked like the lightning was coming from behind the clouds in the western sky, but they were lighting up that sector of the sky in an eerie blue. It was really cool. There was still no rain when I last checked.

With weather like this, it's such a waste to sit inside and ignore it. I know it must not affect people on a spiritual level the way it affects me, but I just can't imagine sitting around and ignoring it. This is the kind of thing I live for. When I hear that wind howling outside, it's as if it were calling to me, and I have to go out and embrace it. I think that if I lived in an area with more frequent severe weather (like actual hurricane country, for example), I'd probably be killed sooner or later by stupidly embracing a dangerous storm when I should be running and hiding. But as I said, this is what I live for, and I just can't ignore it.

So I went outside to watch the sunset and strum my guitar - even though the wind was loud enough at times that I couldn't hear myself play. I came in, but the winds got stronger, and I had to go back out again sometime after dark. I went up in the wooden playhouse structure in the backyard (hereby dubbed "Eagle's Nest") - which I don't think I've been in for the past six years or so. I even took off my clothes and sat up there for a bit, because obviously, clothes just get in the way of connecting with nature.

During the stronger gusts, the wind was able to shake the Eagle's Nest a bit, making me a little nervous. At one point a fairly large branch dropped out of the tree above and wacked the side of the Eagle's Nest. After that point, I became a little more wary and cautious about the severity of the weather. There were some loud noises just over the fence in the neighbor's yard, and though it was dark, it looked as though a large branch - like an actual portion of a tree, magnitudes larger than the branch that hit the Eagle's Nest - hit the neighbor's house. In response to the noises, the neighbors started glancing out their back window with a flashlight trying to assess the damage. At this point I got a little self-conscious and put my clothes back on, which is a good thing, because one of the neighbors then came outside to take a closer look at the damage (which I'd like to think is minor, despite the size of things).

With the super-wind, the full moon, and the blue lightning, it was a hell of an experience. And yet, I still found myself lamenting the fact that it's so hard to get away from people in this area. I wanna go back to Rachel. Not a person from here to the horizon. Sigh.

Yesterday was really hot and humid. Although, it was really far more humid than it was hot. People were exclaiming "it's really hot", and having just been in the desert, I was like, "it's not /hot/, it's just really really humid." There really is a difference. I mean, living around here, hot and humid go together, and when it gets really humid, like when your clothes stick to your skin even when you're not sweating, it feels like its hot. But it's not really that hot, it's just humid. In the desert, it's hot. Here, I can feel the sweat dripping down my back, and I hate that feeling (more so when I have soggy clothes hanging off my back), but in the desert, it's actually about being hot, not wet (or sticky). Oh, what I would have given to be able to dive into a pool while I was out there in the desert...

Anyway, one thing I've learned, other than the difference firsthand between "hot" and "humid", is that my perfect weather is neither intensely hot, nor intensely humid, but a nice mixture of hot and humid, where neither one is too overpowering, but both are present. Whatever good that does, because it's not like I can just dial in the weather whenever I feel like it...