Wierd Weather

One doesn’t normally think of San Diego as the kind of place where one is likely to run into rain, much less hail and sleet — not to mention sub-freezing temperatures.

Yesterday we had all of that, and in astonishing abundance. Shortly after dawn we noticed the first examples of water falling from the sky and hitting the ground with a “tink” instead of a “splash” — hail. The hail was pea-sized at its largest, so it was far from threatening (thankfully!). But there certainly was a lot of it — all of the “white stuff” you see in these photos is accumulated hail, not snow.

The really intense hail started falling locally at just before noon yesterday; it continued intermittently will into the evening. At one point we had close to an inch of the stuff on the ground, and at the moment I drove down the hill to go rescue my blog server, there was so much ice on our driveway that my pickup actually broke loose on the slope and skidded ten feet or so downhill.

This is a brand-new experience for us in southern California. We’ve seen plenty of this sort of stuff in other places (such as New Jersey and Indiana, where Debbie and I grew up), but here?

What’s up with this global warming stuff, anyway? Sure doesn’t look like it on the evidence of the past few days!