This is How You Dress....

...if you buy your clothes from the hardware store....

Rain, wind sleet and hail...we had them all in the night. We went out to walk the perimeter, so to speak, this morning, certain that a tree would be down, but all are still standing, and the power hasn't gone out so the trees on the street must be too. Too cold and wet to do much more than that, so we repaired back inside for coffee and the newspapers. Front page headline is U.S. halts Russia nuclear treaty. What next? 

We decided to go to Harmony Farm Supply in Sebastopol to get some seed potatoes...as good an excuse for a little field trip in the rain as any. In OilMan's book anyway, and I was more or less along for the ride.
I quite liked this nattily dressed fellow in the middle of the irrigation supplies....

The roads through the laguna were clear of standing water if not dry, and the lagoon wasn't quite ready for kayaks, but one vineyard was up to its knees in water as we drove by. This is actually standard for the winter here, and the fact that we haven't seen it for a couple of years is already worrisome. Better even than the water in the Laguna, is the fact that the Sierra snowpack is already 70% of normal. There have been a couple of years when the official team that went out to make the measurement were pictured in the paper standing in the middle of a dry meadow.