Halfway there?

The gauge holds up to 11" (280 mm) of rain at a time.

Right now we have received a hefty 3.45" (88 mm) of rain from the series of storms coming in off the Pacific ocean. The early predictions were for double or even four times that much, which just might happen by the time this storm passes.

The current satellite image shows that it stretches out westward clear past Hawaii. So far the rain has been steady, with a few bursts of energy along with plenty of strong wind. I get the feeling that we’re gonna get a whole bunch of new firewood candidates. These wind/rain events usually topple a few trees. Time to sharpen the chain saws.

The old rain gauge

Before I get inundated with a request to see the old rain gauge with a bullet hole in it, I took it back to the 4x4 redwood post and hung it for one last time. As you can see, it’s crazed, has a chip out of its top and a hole put there by Hilary in her Annie Oakley days when no beverage can was safe from being multi-perforated by her and her gun-totin’ buddies. The neighbors would call—“What’s all that shooting?” they’d ask nervously, thinking the sheriff had finally found the pot growers at home up on the hillside. “It’s nothing,” I would say. “Just the rain gauge.”

It’s a neat gauge. Inside is a narrower tube that fills with the first inch of rain, calibrated in hundredths. When it’s full, it spills into the larger outer body. Its capacity, without the bullet hole, is eleven inches (280 mm). I paid an astonishing $40 for it back in the mid-1980s and haven’t found an exact replacement, at least not from Taylor, its original maker.

Rain? In August?

Just about the last thing you need in summertime in the foothills of Central California is a rain gauge. So my old (at least 25 years) weather beaten, leaky, worn out rain gauge with a bullet hole in it was taken down a few weeks ago and retired. The new gauge given to me by neighbor Bill hasn’t been installed because I want to move the post on which it will be mounted away from the little olive tree next to it which grew into a huge rain-shadowing monster and has been probably giving me incorrect rain readings ever since as a result of its being there. So I haven’t a clue as to how much rain fell last night and early this morning. The bedrock mortar holes above offer a clue; maybe we got a small part of an inch or even a few millimeters. Hard to say.

“Natural” rain gauge

In the title, natural is in quotation marks because today’s cow is far from whatever cows were a few thousand years ago before we domesticated them. But at least the photo shows something that isn’t man-made. I can tell by its size that the gauge was made by one of the bigger, older cows. One with experience and a whole lot of savvy. You see, cows depend on rain to provide needed moisture for growing grass. So they place these gauges in the fields they expect to depend on for feed, and keep in mind the various amounts of rainfall in each of the fields. When the rainy season ends, they can mosey off to the promising fields without wasting time traveling to the ones that will be grass-deficient. And you thought they were just dumb old cows!