Hilo: Where Rain Reigns

About three weeks after I got here, Kalewa and I were in town and saw a car with a bumper sticker which I basically paraphrased as the title of this post. And it's no joke. It has rained here a lot. Now, I'm aware of all of the usual agruements, including but not limited to:

"You're from Colorado, which is technically a desert, so any rain will seem like a lot of rain."

"You knew it was rainy before you moved here."

"The rain is just God crying becase you make him sad."

and the ever-popular:

"Everyone knows that condensation occurs on the windward side of an island because the rising air cools by adiabatic expansion, so the air becomes saturated and the water vapor condenses, thus forming precipitation."

Yeah yeah yeah. Enough with your superstitions!

Still, everyone here up the road has said that it has been an unusally rainy year. And the numbers support them. The weather station at the Hilo Airport had recorded nearly 60" of rain in 2009 by the end of April, which is almost a third again more than the usual 45.5" for that time of year. Add that to the fact that there are not many sunny days here on the farm where I look down on a rainy Hilo, but there have been several rainy days here when Hilo is nice and sunny. Per the numbers, Hilo has only had another 7" of rain since the end of April, but I'm guessing we had 7" of rain here in just the last three weeks.

"That's a lot of guessing," I can hear you saying already, so I decided to set up my rain guage again, and to start keeping track. I bought it a few months ago, but stopped using it when, without fail, every time I checked it it was overflowing it's 5" guage capacity. I think now that the rain has slowed some, I should have a better chance of staying on top of it.

Funny though....it was raining again this morning, and then off and on through midday, but as soon as I put that stupid rain guage out there, I could almost hear the squeaky spigot as God turned off the rain, as if to say "How dare you quantify my good works! I'll show you!" but I guess the Big Cheese is over it, because I can hear the pitter-patter of raindrops on the yurt roof as I'm typing.

And no, I'm not complaining about the rain. I still really enjoy it. But I think some numbers about how much rain we're getting would be handy.

Anyway, here are some pictures I've taken since of been here that are kinda rain oriented. Enjoy.