[sic]

10:11 p.m. 2-1 in favor of the Cards. Bottom of the ninth. One out. Bases empty. Three balls and two strikes to Matt Kemp. Then the sky opened up and two minutes after this shot was snapped umpires said no more and out came the tarps.

Not only have I never been to a Dodger game before by bike. But I’ve never been to one where it rained, much less delayed the game.

Dare I admit that my friend Michael and I bailed out of our seats and took refuge under the eaves. And not long after the umpires ordered the field cleared we ordered ourselves out of the stadium to our bikes and homeward.

(click for full-stylized quadrification)

A bit of blue sky broke through early yesterday afternoon. Then it went away for the rest of the day (click to quadrify):

Looking out the office window yesterday afternoon I was a bit double-taken aback to find what looked like a funnel cloud forming somewhere not at all far enough away to the south (click to quadruplify):

Can’t say whether it was or just an illusion of perspective (more likely), but the good news either way was that it didn’t get any more ominous looking than this.

Storming on the ride home Sunday night I amused myself by pointing and shooting several frames. This is my fave of the bunch (click to quadrupilate):

As macro-snapped on the sill outside the window of my office at 11:24 a.m. this morning (click to quadruplate):

With the exception of getting caught in showers that arrived ahead of schedule a few Mondays ago, I’m usually the model of trepidation and will substitute to a more conventional means of transport if the word on the weathermap is water’s to fall. Of course with such avoidance tactics, most of those times I’m left behind the wheel of my truck stuck in traffic and grumbling because the clouds never open up either as expected or at all.

Thus it was when the alarms started sounding yesterday that Los Angeles could be in for a series of storms that could combine to be the heaviest to hit town in many years beginning as early as today and going through Sunday, I did two things:

1) I immediately pffft’d the prognosticatings because when the weatherfolk start getting all excited that some storm’s a sure thing or gonna be huge, it usually finds a way not to be all that.

2) Decided to drive to work just in case they nail it this time.

But when I woke up this morning, I took a good look at the brightening sky while moving the trashcans to the curb and didn’t see roiling clouds. Then I took a deep exploratory sniff of the air and I didn’t smell rain. And bonus: my right knee wasn’t achy. I hemmed and hawed and pro’d and con’d and while the wise part of me was saying “just take the truck,” the gambler inside reminded me of how aggravated I was last time I played it safe and such caution was all for naught.

So I’m rolling the dice and riding in. Here’s hoping I beat the odds.

(click to quadruplify)

I’m loving the rain (while at the same time hoping it doesn’t bring about slides in the burn areas), but then again it looks like it’s gonna linger  through today and even tomorrow which’ll keep me off my bike and stuck about 50 miles from the 3,000-mile mark I would have passed today had the weather stayed fair.

This crystal clear morning provided a nice vista from my office of the distant San Gabriels dusted with some of that mythical white stuff (click to biggify):