Armageddon. OK, not really, but Nature is kicking our ass!

Personally I have lived about half my life in San Diego or One of it's Suburbs... I did brief stints as a wee one in LA and NYC before moving to Poway when I was about 4 where I lived until I moved to Austin when I was 14.  Now as a child, rain was VERY rare indeed. Poway was naturally dry and hot, which is not really odd since southern California is mostly a freakin' desert anyway. Those ten years in Poway I basically NEVER saw rain. I do recall it was a drought, and there were all kinds of water rationing and fire warnings. I guess officially my recollection is likely based on the period from 1987-1992.

Then I moved to Austin Texas in 1994. WHAT A CHANGE!!! In Poway even 100 was not really that bad. I remember getting off to the plain and feeling unable to breath from the Humidity in the air! I LOVE Austin but frankly summer's there suck. Month long periods of dense humidity where it's still often 80 degrees when the sun is about to COME UP!

Where am I going with this? Well nature is a fickle friend. I noticed when I went to Austin for a couple weddings (avoiding parking garages at all costs....) and while I LOVED the weather, apparently that dryness was the result of massive drought. My friend Ginni's wedding was actually on the Lake and you could see how low the water level was. Apparently it is the driest 7 months on record!

Here in California we've been complaining of wet weather all winter, and we have been getting HAMMERED with snow in the Sierra Nevada range and other mountains. I read in the LA Times that too much snow has resulted in a 12% DECLINE in skiers because people couldn't get to the slopes, or felt unsafe.

Nature has been showing it's teeth in even louder ways so far this year. We have recently had a rash of tornadoes in the South that easily qualifies for the biggest natural disaster since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which took the lives of 1800 people and destroyed New Orleans along with tons of other negative effects. So far 481 Americans have been killed by tornados this spring! News reports indicate 116 or 117 people have been killed in a recent tornado in Joplin! While researching sources for this article, I found a post that was making a similar observation of recent natural phenomenon's excesses. 

Earlier this year a massive 9.0 earthquake hit Japan, along with a massive Tsunami which caused enough trouble on it's own. THEN came problems with radioactive contamination, and resulting collateral problems to energy security for Japan. Currently in the United States after bad Hurricanes, and the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana is currently under historical flooding problems, and the Army Corps of Engineers is working hard to save two major cities, New Orleans and Baton Rouge from flooding at the cost of flooding mammoth swatch of countryside and farms.

What's coming next I wonder? 2011 promised to be an interesting year in many ways, but I'll be keeping a close eye on nature!