A Different Stairway to Heaven

John Scalzi made mention on Wednesday of the classic Led Zeppelin song Stairway to Heaven.  The entry before that was about cirrus clouds at sunset. I'll use both as my lame excuse to post this sunset picture I took over the weekend. 

When I saw this multicolored stack of cirrus clouds between the trees, I insisted on running back into the house for the digital camera. I did so because that's what the clouds looked like to me: a stairway to heaven.  Except, of course, that you'd need a transdimensional portal at the top. Otherwise, you're stuck in the sky with the Davis-Monthan pilots. They're mostly off in Iraq these days, so I imagine the Tucson sky is getting lonely about now.  Even the scheduled summer rain isn't hanging around up there.

I've been waiting for an opportunity to get some good monsoon pictures for this journal, but so far, the monsoon in Tucson is a bust this year.  It's rained almost daily over the mountains (at least, that's how it looks from my house), but that's no more than an empty promise to the rest of the city.  It's hardly rained at all in Tucson itself.  What little rain we've had (last night, for example) has mostly been after dark.

Annoyingly enough, the lack of rain in the city has not stopped people from needing to be rescued from flooded washes.  Just this week there were reports about a guy who tried to cross the Canada del Oro wash at La Cholla Boulevard on Monday night. At the time there was a severe thunderstorm warning - but it wasn't raining, and the wash was supposedly dry. There was no barricade, and no obvious, immediate reason for the man not to continue down the street.  He started across the wash, and was hit with a sudden wall of water from upstream. 

Rural Metro couldn't even rescue the man until the water receded.

Because there was no barricade and he did nothing wrong or illegal, the man won't be charged for the rescue under the local Stupid Motorist Law.

Karen