Crispy Smoked South Florida Anyone?

Going through the online routine this morning I saw that we made the Weather Channel's web page.

Not me, but South Florida. 

An interesting statistic is that we should expect 21 inches of rain in the first half of the year so far.  May and June are "Wet Season" months so the rains should set up and we would be greening up.

Nope.  Try again.

It has been a very dry year here so far.  I'm waiting for the water mismanagement district to start lowering Lake O because Hurricane Season is here, and instead of fixing that levee system, they lower the levels early.  While they're thinking about that I'm seeing pictures of canals that have dried up.  You can walk across one of those straight ribbons of water that you see running parallel to the major roads in South Florida. 

The reason?  We had all of four inches of rain all year.  

Four.

No wonder why my yard has dry patches and there's a layer of dust over everything.  Not much you can do about that but wait it all out. 

Specifically, wait it all out and conserve water use.

It hasn't been terribly hot here, in fact it has been "seasonable" or a few degrees cooler than normal.  It is all relative when you think about it, but we should have temps in the mid 90s now, where they have been down to the low to mid 90s instead.  Lets split a few hairs while we are at it.

The last time it got this dry, the Everglades begun to burn.   We had a major thunderstorm cell just miss us last night with 70 MPH gusts and while that can be entertaining, it did nothing to my dry grass.  The lightning must have ignited a few blazes since this morning when I walked outside, there was the distinct smell of smoke and instead of a bright yellow sun rising over the big hotels at the beach, it was an orange blob.

Luckily all of my flowers in pots are on "Drip Feed" irrigation so they won't be harmed unless the well out back goes dry, but the grass is a different story. 

Hopefully we'll get the normal patterns again, what ever they may be. 

It used to be at this time you could set your watch by the 4pm storms.  They'd percolate up, rain for 20 minutes and move on late afternoon.  Good time to get off the beach.

Now the storms are more infrequent and when they do fall, you could get rain in the back yard and not in the front. 

A 30 Percent Chance of Rain means there is a 100 Percent Chance that 30 percent of us will get wet.

The rest will still have dust on the hood of their cars in the morning.

Well... here's hoping a light tropical wave parks just south of Lake O and brings the Everglades back.  Nobody wants that burning!

...and send a little T Storm our way, the Island City is looking a little parched.