Goals

From what I've heard, it's important to set goals in life. So this year, I set the ambitious goal of being so lazy that I would only publish one blog post a month. And up until now, I've single mindedly stuck with it, ruthlessly pushing aside any thought of doing more than "Monthly Revisited's". In fact, I've almost exceeded my goal, by barely even getting those done.

But, as so often happens with goals, life has different plans.

And what broke my resolve was this summer's 71 day dry spell, which ended yesterday. It started June 20th, after a cold and rainy first half of June, and went on and on and on and on and so forth until I got really sick of keeping track of the number of days and then, thankfully, we had 0.09" of rain yesterday.

Since I use this blog as a sort of memory-jogging device, I figured I'd better do a post about the dry spell. Especially since it might be one of the longest dry spells on record for Hood River. I say "might", because my daily records don't go back any further than 2000, and I don't have access to MCAREC's more official (and much longer term) daily records. But I can say that 71 days is the longest here since 2000, and exceeded last year's dry spell of 66 days.

For the video that I've gotten in the habit of including with these blog posts, I was trying to think of songs specifically about "long dry spells ending". The first one that came to mind was the Eurythmic's classic "Here Comes The Rain Again". However, as I watched the video, I remembered that I really don't like that song all that much. Maybe it's the key of B-minor, changing to B-suspended, maybe it's the melancholy aspect of unrequited love. Maybe it's the fact that she wants this guy to "talk to her, like lovers do". Probably about "feelings". Yuck yuck yuck. I cringe just thinking about it....

Anyway, I decided to do a Google search on "songs about rain", and here's what I came up with: a song about songs about rain!

Now, if only someone would do a song about THIS song, about songs that are about songs about songs that are about songs about songs that are about rain...

July 2010 Revisited

Compared to historical averages, July in Hood River was either warmer or cooler (depending on long term vs short term averages), drier, and slightly windier.

At my weather station, the average temperature of 69.3° was warmer than long term averages (67.3°), but cooler than more recent (2000-2009) averages of 71.7°, making it the coolest July at my weather station since 2001. The high heat index for the month was 97°, and the low wind chill was 46°.

There were brief hot spells around the 8th and 24th, but other than that, no major heat waves.

There was no measurable rainfall, which isn't unusual for July in Hood River.

The 24 hour avg wind speed was 5.1 mph against an average of 5.0 mph. This broke the long stretch of lower average wind speeds that had held for the previous 10 months. July was windy, for sure, but then July is, on average, the windiest month in Hood River.

There was 1 local weather record set in July. On July 10th, the "high low" temperature of 68° surpassed the old record of 66° (1985).

The tabular data below is from my home weather station. To view its July 2010 monthly summary and graphs at Weather Underground, click here.

The "historical average" numbers for temperature and rainfall are from the Hood River MCAREC data. Historical wind average is from my station's 2000 to 2009 data. Note that average wind speeds include all 24 hours of the day and night, which is why they are way lower than daytime peak winds. In addition, the wind speed at this station is considerably lower than on the Columbia River.

	High	Low	Average	Historical Average
Temperature (F)	100	46	69.3	67.3
Wind (mph)	38		5.1	5.0
Rainfall (in)	0.00		0.00 (total)	0.22

A gorgeous Gorge sunset, shot by local videographer Tyler Shortt