Rain mid-month?

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• It is spectacular,Kate. More like the winter of 1996-7 when I first came here. Heavy November and December rains, Safeway's parking lot (the old one by the now vanished movie house) flooded deep, my first experience with sandbagging and burm building. The rains gave way to this kind of dreamy warm. I got a job at the bronze foundary in Marina. It was cold there, but the drive south to Big Sur always brought a lovely ten degree change to mild nights and sunny hot days straight through to spring. At Pfeiffer park last night with friends. The river bed looks like Dan's beautiful photograph. Campgrounds filled with campers and their fires, spots of talk and laughter, starlight roaring down. This beautiful place.

• Checked the GOES "full disk" satellite photo of the whole Pacific, and there it is...the whole story of what is coming our way. We have been in a "block" of a huge high pressure area taking up the eastern half of the Pacific. You can see the Jet Stream shooting over the top of it, carrying the storm track up over Washington and Idaho (yes, it is snowing up in Cascade now). East of this high, the Jet Stream dives back down into the Midwest, hauling all that Arctic air southward to collide with the Gulf of Mexico's warm in a nasty storm scene that has plagued the East. Out west of us, above Hawaii is the next "block". Here, is a very powerful and very large cyclone, drawing moist air up from Hawaii, and cold stuff from Siberia. It looks like a force that is finally a match against the parked high pressure dome.It will gradually push the high eastward, until the leading edge reaches us around next Saturday. Watch these massive "sine waves" of the Jet Stream looping up and down around the Earth. These waves, called "blocking" move from west to east around the planet, particularly in Winter. So enjoy the sunny days, and watch this rhythm of the weather rotating and bending like waves in the sea. I will send the jpeg of this satellite photo to you right now.