severe thunderstorm has hit

Hard to tell just how hard it is raining in these pictures, but you can tell it's heavy, looking at the puddles in the street. It has only been raining about 3 minutes.

so what do YOU do when there's a tornado watch?

You play with bubbles, of course. The humidity was really high, so the bubbles lasted forever. For your information, here is a great bubble solution recipe that I found on the giant bubble wand package:

24 ounces (3 cups) dishwashing liquid (original blue Dawn works best)

3/4 cup corn syrup

12 cups water

Mix and play!

There were tornadoes very close to us, but none in our immediate area. Still under a watch until 8:00 am this morning, with severe thunderstorm warning for the day.

the best weather forecast EVAH!

Mr. BikeMan makes fun of me because I am a weather junkie. One year for Christmas he bought me two books on weather forecasting. I love them! But all the while he says, why don't you just look out the window and see what the weather is doing? I get a certain thrill when that red crawl appears on the bottom of the TV screen and that creepy repeating buzz sound blares... It's Weather Time! He rolls his eyes.

There must be other people like him, because I found out about this website this morning: Umbrellatoday.com.

happy easter!

This is one of those boring food and weather posts...but I like to create a historical record for the sake of memory keeping...see my memory post below, and you'll understand why.

As this will probably be our last predictably-hot Easter, we took full advantage of the beautiful desert springtime weather. The girls were able to wear summer dresses to church which they do every Sunday, but it still strikes me as strange for some reason -- an Easter dress without a white cardigan just seems off somehow.

I roasted a Top Sirloin roast on the grill prepped with a rosemary-garlic salt rub (rosemary is from our herb garden out back), grilled asparagus, and made crusty bread and creme brulee' for dessert.

While dinner was cooking, we had an outdoor Easter egg hunt in the backyard, complete with chocolate candy melting inside of plastic eggs, and then we ate our dinner on the back patio. After dinner, the girls rode their scooters and bikes up and down the street while I knitted on the front porch... pleasant all around, but still - mid 80's on April 4? Strange.

The human body is very adaptable

We formerly lived in one of the coldest places in North America...not unusual to be sub-zero for weeks on end in January. It was 110 this weekend in Almost Mexico, AND we knew we had to finish our backyard before the upcoming "monsoon" season. (We have this weather phenomenon called the "monsoon" every summer -- no, we don't live in Bali.) It can be perfectly sunny and 110 at noon, and multiple inches of rain dumped down at 4:00 pm, then clear again by 6:00.

We put down 11 tons of "desert brown" 3/8ths inch crushed rock in our backyard this weekend. Surprisingly, it looks really nice -- very finished and groomed. We have a couple of trees, some soft grasses and pretty boulders. Anyway, we had the rock dumped in our driveway on Thursday morning (it was well over 100 that day), schlepped rock Thursday, Friday and Saturday. But we are done!

All of this to say, the human body is very adaptable to climate change. Both of us were surpisingly un-uncomfortable...as long as we kept drinking water.

The best thing about a rock backyard is the new little kiddie pool for the girls -- no grass clippings on their feet, or mud tracked into the house. It's the little things that put a smile on a mom's face.