A Damp, Maybe Moist, Desert

It rained a bit overnight, but since the roof doesn't leak I didn't know about it until I woke up and went outside.

One thing that happens when it rains, at least from April to November or so when I have the top down on the Jeep, is Rama gets wet. When I'm smart enough to think about it, I can toss a tarp over the top, roll up the windows, and keep the interior dry. That's assuming, of course, that what I don't do is dump the water that's collected on the tarp inside the Jeep.

It's been known to happen. Fairly frequently, if I'm honest.

This time I didn't do that, due in part because I never put the tarp up to begin with. When I was first looking around outside I could tell right away that some rain had fallen because the sand was crunchy and made noise with every step I took.  Beach sand doesn't do that, but my desert sand does.

Also, the air all smells like creosote, a very pleasant smell that you have to be in this part of the desert to ever experience or know about. I don't know -- I never knew about creosote bushes until I moved here, but maybe they grow other places.

A couple things in my life change when it rains. For one, the streets (usually in the same, known places) flood and get covered with sand and water. Related to that, snowplows appear (really!) to scrape the sand off the paved streets and graders sometime show up to take care of the dirt roads that need some help.

On a more personal note, whenever Rama gets wet enough, her radio dies.

I have no idea what part of the radio gets wet and causes it to stop working, but (so far) it's a part that also dries off in, at most, a couple of days, and the radio works again. It scared  me the first time, but by now I've sorta gotten used to it. There's still a niggling concern that it will never come back, but I've had a few cars with no radio in my life and if hers dies, well, it won't kill me.

The other nice thing about a little rainfall is that my dogs can be busy outside for hours sniffing all the new desert smells. I can't smell as well as I used to (none of my senses are what they used to be), so I can only imagine how nice it is for them.

The other big thing this rain has brought is sticky, unpleasant humidity, so my whole body feels like the under boob sweat that I hear so many women complain about. The new thing it does is render my new little, portable swamp cooler useless. Any time the humidity gets over 40% or so, it still goes through the motions, but can't cool the air.

I'm not all that crazy about it, anyway, but I refuse to believe I made a mistake in buying it. No, even though it says it will cool five hundred square feet (a quarter more than the cabin), it hasn't been able to do that yet. That may be due to the humidity, or maybe I was just ridiculously optimistic, but the good news is it does project a nice cool breeze if I'm within three feet (1m) of it. Which, maybe, is mostly what I wanted it to do, because I can set it up right near my bed and actually sleep at night without running the air conditioner.

But -- oh! -- it's wonderful to drive around in the desert after a rain and see what's changed. Pretty much makes everything else worthwhile.

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