Monsoon coming?

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:India_southwest_summer_monsoon_onset_map_en.svg#file

The monsoon is coming. It's raining a little this evening after being cloudy much of the day. The local pundits tell me that this is really the "pre - monsoon" time - a few days to a week of cloud and occasional sprinkles and light showers before the heavy rains of the true monsoon.

Everybody is excited and watchfully anticipating the coming of the rain - even or maybe especially - the locals.  Of course it hasn't rained since early October.
I found myself and my colleagues looking out the window at the clouds trying to anticipate exactly when they would give their blessings on us.

It's been interesting observing the weather the last couple of months. People warned us that April and May would be the really hot summer months before the monsoon came.  April was hot with temps during the middle of the day in the mid to upper 90's most days, but that heat only lasted a few hours and the early morning and late evenings were really not too bad, with a gently breeze and temps in the high seventies. When May came, so too did the humidity. The high temperatures weren't as hot, usually around 90 degrees, though it felt just as hot or even hotter with the heat index in the 100's. The big difference to me was that the evenings and early mornings only cooled to the mid eighties and the humidity remained high.  The last few days have been just a little cooler as we all await the coming "rains".

 A couple of things surprised me about this "Indian Summer":

The first was the number of trees that flower in so many colours during the hottest part of the year!
Yellows and reds seem to proliferate, though there are lots of shades of white and even pink. Seemed strange to us to be in such hot weather with the blossoms on the trees.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Yellow_poinciana_full_bloom_20110518.jpg

The second was the fact that the air is so seldom still, so that on most days sitting in the shade with a little breeze is quite bearable even when walking around in the sun may not be.

Finally, I had forgotten that April and May are the summer months for the local schools here.  As we are winding down the school year, they finished two months ago and are ready to resume.  Rakesh pointed out some school kids this morning in their new school uniforms. Some of the schools restarted this week.

The rains.

(A story)
We came home after a good day of work at school. I stopped by the elementary building and helped Nancy with a computer issue and so we got home about 5:15. She was hungry so she went ahead and got out the pesto and pasta that the housekeeper had prepared for us per our directions. It was good.
I sat down at the couch and checked my email and Facebook, then turned on the TV to see if I could catch the news before I too ate my supper.

No Luck.

The TV comes on just fine, but on the screen there is a message "Technical Problem - your set top box is not receiving signal" , followed by a set of four instructions telling me to turn off and back on, etc.  I had had this problem another day and found that the housekeeper had switched off the box when she cleaned, so I went about checking , turning things on and off, changing channels, etc.

No luck.

So I gave it up and went and enjoyed supper. Sat back down to do some work and looked at the screen again to see if it had somehow fixed itself (these things do sometimes), when I re- read the final line of the technical problem instructions:
4. In heavy rain, please wait till the rain subsides to regain signal.
(end of story)

By Rakesh Krishna Kumar from Mumbai, India (Under heavy assault) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Yes, the rains came today.

After a fairly dry monsoon season so far with mostly just scattered showers since the middle of July, today felt like Monsoon.  The rain started this morning and has been coming down steadily all day. Punctuated by sessions of heavier, "bucket dumping" , but not interrupted with thunder or lightening or high winds, the water just keeps coming down.  Mostly straight down, so its easy to stand under a bit of shelter and look out and listen. What a great sight and sound experience.  I have to tear myself away from the window now to write this.
It is glorious.

I love the rain. For more than 30 years my colleagues in Michigan would think I was joking when, before my annual camping trip with a large group of grade 8 students , I would say, "I hope we get some rain." I wasn't joking.
There is something magical and life-giving about the rain, especially in an agricultural land that goes three quarters of the year without much rain and depends on the regular monsoon rains for 80% of its rainfall.
There was a little flooding on the way home from school on the main road.  Traffic of course moves slower because as the roads flood from the sides, the roads get narrower and narrower and people begin to walk down the middle of road more than usual to avoid the flooding. Our side road had just small rivulets on each side a few hours ago, but the last time I checked out the window, I saw that the water streached from side to side. 

All the old-timers at ASB trot out the story of the monsoon of 2005 (I think?) when the flood was so strong that some folks were stuck in the school for three days. I think I would have liked to have been here.