Wishing for rain

I really do think the drought we've had (and the extended hot temperatures: it's supposed to be like 95 again today) is affecting my moods badly.

I drove in this morning and looked at the dustpit that used to be the lawn of my building and just felt sad. (And the fact that some people still insist on trying to MOW their dust pits, and kick all that dust up into the air, which makes me hack and wheeze, doesn't help).

The thing that really gets to me? The climatologists are saying, "Expect this to continue until mid-2012." We're in a strong La Nina event* and that leads to warmer, dryer conditions in this part of the world.

(*Odd fact: La Nina used to be called El Viejo. Apparently the chain of thought went like this: El Nino, the originally-discovered "abnormality"** in the Pacific (warmer than normal water) was so-named by fishermen who found it showed up around Christmas - so they named it El Nino, for the Christ child. And then, later, when the other pattern (cooler temperatures in the Pacific) was discovered, they figured, "This is opposite of El Nino, so we need to give it the opposite name. Some chose "El Viejo" (the old man) but I guess "La Nina" (the girl-child) won out over time. (I vaguely remember my dad referring to an "El Viejo" pattern...or it being referred to on the news - when I was a kid).

**I'm not sure why they still think of these things as "abnormalities" - it seems they occur on a pretty regular basis.

So anyway: we have La Nina to blame for this horrible, horrible weather pattern.

Eventually North Texas and Oklahoma are going to be all burnt up, so I guess the wildfires will stop eventually. (That's the other awful thing: huge wildfires in fields, some of them - perhaps even MOST, at this point - being deliberately set. And that's another one of those "I don't UNDERSTAND people" moments. I know that wanting to set fires is a sort of compulsion and could be helped, perhaps, with medical care...but it's just so extra awful right now for the firefighters to have to deal with fires people have set. And the ranchers, who might lose what little hay they had...)

I think my forsythia has died; at least, it looks all wilted. At this point I don't know if it's worth trying to water it to see if it will come back or not. I'm also starting to worry about my big old pecan and my elm tree.