{"id":37503,"date":"2026-07-12T14:26:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-12T21:26:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=37503"},"modified":"2026-07-12T14:26:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-12T21:26:09","slug":"stormy-weather","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=37503","title":{"rendered":"Stormy Weather"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Donna&#8217;s home from her trip to Michigan. The dogs and I are happy and so is she. She didn&#8217;t enjoy the train ride out or the plane ride back. On that, we&#8217;re on the same page: barring urgent necessity, we&#8217;re driving. Granted, that pretty much limits us to the southwestern U.S. We&#8217;re planning a road trip to Colorado in September or October. It&#8217;ll be just the two of us, traveling by car and staying in motels along the way, stopping to see the sights when we feel like it. We get along well on long car trips and probably bond more than we do at home.<\/p>\n<p><a title=\"IMG_9386\" href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/halfmind\/55389319060\/in\/datetaken-public\/\" data-flickr-embed=\"true\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/live.staticflickr.com\/31337\/55389319060_7e1a1a5513_w.jpg\" alt=\"IMG_9386\" width=\"225\" height=\"400\" \/><\/a><script async src=\"\/\/embedr.flickr.com\/assets\/client-code.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script>A thunderstorm swept through our area yesterday evening, accompanied by high winds. By the time I grabbed my iPhone to take a video, the wind had died down and the rain was no longer horizontal. You&#8217;re probably thinking big deal, that&#8217;s just rain and I&#8217;ve seen worse, but trust me, last night every Tucsonan with access to a cell phone camera was videotaping the storm. Except for Donna, freshly back from Michigan, where downpours like last night&#8217;s are no biggy.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;re in our monsoon season, which runs from mid-June to the end of September. Sadly, in the 28 years we&#8217;ve lived here all but two or three monsoons have been busts. Last night&#8217;s storm was the second one so far this season, and I won&#8217;t be surprised if, once again, that&#8217;s all we get. In those rare years when it lives up to its name, the monsoon is a thing to behold, flooding low-lying areas and isolating entire neighborhoods. This year&#8217;s monsoon, pushed by a super El Ni\u00f1o over the Pacific, is supposed to be a real one. Mind you, they&#8217;ve been saying that for a month now and it hasn&#8217;t gotten real yet.<\/p>\n<p>About my video: I get why camera buffs hate the vertical format. But most of us use cell phones in place of cameras now, and even though\u00a0 the controls are just as easy to use horizontally as vertically, the fact that we hold our phones upright to make and take calls makes it natural to hold them that way when taking photos and videos. Social media photo and video sites like Instagram and TikTok pretty much default to the vertical format, and how do most of us hold our phones look at those sites? It&#8217;s the phones, damnit.<\/p>\n<p>Stay fresh, cheese bags!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Donna&#8217;s home from her trip to Michigan. The dogs and I are happy and so is she.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[555,2],"tags":[4914,4913,4912],"class_list":["post-37503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-color","category-personal","tag-portraitmodeversuslandscapemode","tag-theweather","tag-trainsplanesautomobiles"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37503"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37503\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37513,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37503\/revisions\/37513"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}