Monsoon Rains

We're getting monsoon rains out of the East, climbing out of Nevada, of all places, and eventually cresting the Sierras. The rain is spattery and large drops, but they are infrequent so flat surfaces are wet, angled ones are damp and vertical ones are dry. There's no wind. The storm has been drifting in since yesterday. Its peculiar, but apparently not terribly uncommon for the Sierras. The times I'd lived here before this sort of thing was rare, but that was a start of some odd weather, and things are getting back to normal. That means summer thunderstorms, lightning struck fires, and this sort of slow drifts of big rain drops. Its odd, but not that unusual for the area. A few years ago, before I moved up here, they had 100 inches of rain. That's about half what you get in rainforests, a double what you need for a healthy temperate forest to be happy.

 

The porch decking is nearly done. It is MUCH stronger and more stable than the prior one. No more bounce. No more creaking. Replacing the beams and joists and giving them actual pillars to hold them up? Huge improvement in structural stability. The problem with shoddy construction is eventually it fails and the guys who fix it know EXACTLY what you did wrong. We are mostly done. We have a few more steps, but the boards are down, the railings attached, and things are where they are supposed to be.