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I worked from home yesterday by the grace of my boss who took mercy on me in the wake of about three hours of work getting destroyed Monday night when a power burp to the building browned out my computer and rather than run crying from my office I manned up and stayed until after midnight redoing it all.

As such I had a front row seat to the storm that swept through Tuesday, the intensity of the rain along with some thunder and lightning proving to be a distraction from my duties:

During one such brief excursion, I found a poor butterfly plastered to the porch floor, being veritably pummeled by droplets that seemed to nail it with a precision accuracy. So of course I scooped it up as delicately as possible and brought it in to dry off.

Tough little fella that it is, I’m guessing it took one to many water bombs to the noggin. Its probiscus is stuck in the out position and its head is also craned over at an awkward angle. Susan came home and recognized that rather than be allowed to suffer such a grounded and contained indignity, the insect could serve a greater good as a snack for one of our three treefrogs. But I petulantly balked at that option staving off its execution, especially after it made valiant if attempts to consume some of the drops of sugar water I provided it.

This morning, it’s still alive and standing, but I’m thinking it selfish of me to prolong its misery and instead do the right thing in surrendering it to the amphibians. We’ll see.

Also this a.m. while taking the trash cans to the street I found that, however fleeting a visit it was, old Jack Frost stopped by during the cold night, leaving his calling card on the underside of our porch table… that, or he’s got one helluva coke habit:

And lastly, it wouldn’t be STROMWARTCH!!1!!1 without the obligatory snap of the precipitation accumulated throughout the morning and afternoon — somewhere around an inch — in the official receptacle, brought to you by Mason and its extensive line of jars:

(click for the bigger picture)

The long afternoon’s worth of rain had passed before nightfall, and when I left work near 7 p.m. I was eager to see what increase there might be to Ballona Creek’s water level.  The good news is it wasn’t enough to warrant the locking of the bikeway entrance gates. The bad news is it wasn’t enough to warrant the locking of the bikeway entrance gates. But the creek was still up and moving with a swift intensity, and that was enough to warrant me stopping in fascination just to listen to and watch the rushing water, and get the above 15-second exposure.

You have to understand, as a native of Los Angeles with its channelized river no one talked about much less paid attention to unless a dead body turned up in it, I grew up in absolute awe of moving water wherever I could find it. During or after a rain I would often occupy my afternoon hours in the gutters on the streets I lived on, either just watching the water or launching paper boats I’d made and chasing them downstream until they either got snagged on debris or got too close for comfort to the sewer entrance waiting to swallow them up.

The first time I saw a real river, I was 7, staying with my aunt and uncle and cousins for the summer. It was the Tennessee as it curves through Chattanooga. It was full and flowing through the city and entirely blew my tiny mind.

I remember one time, maybe I was 8 or 9. It was a Saturday and it had been raining hard all Friday. So my friend Danny Lindell and I spent the better part of the morning hammering and glueing together these ridiculous flat-bottomed boats out of some junked wood pieces that we found in a nearby alley with the intent of sailing them along the small rivulet of a creek that used to run through the park behind LACMA, only a few blocks east from where we lived on Tower Drive south of Wilshire on the literal eastern edge of the slums of Beverly Hills. The 90212.

Once we were finished we marched over there, thrilled to find the tiny waterway much more full thanks to the storm. Of course, our boats were way too big and heavy to float — and on top of that being so close to the La Brea Tar Pits there was tar everywhere that Danny and I succeeded in getting all over our hands and shoes and clothes. And the boats, which we threw in the trash.

Was the excursion a failure? As shipbuilders, totally. And boy did our moms think so when we got home soaked and tar-caoted. But to me, not at all. Because of the water. The moving water.

So that’s why, 40 years later I still seek it out when I can. I still stop alongside it. I close my eyes and listen to it. I’m fascinated by it. I get out my camera and try to balance it still on fence posts in attempts to capture it. Because in LA it’ll be gone tomorrow and who knows when it’ll be back.

And on what’s expected to have been the last day of this week-long series of storms over Los Angeles, I measured an additional 0.375 inches, bringing the total accumulation to 2.71875 inches.  And for my next trick I will measure the amounts that evaporate. Just kidding. The end.

Yeah, yeah. I know the storm has wreaked havoc in other areas, and last night put on quite a show with heavy downpours, huge lightning and a touch of the hail as I was driving home in it, but in terms of my locations in the city during these past four days, I haven’t been very impressed — especially in terms of the overall rainfall I’ve been monitoring to which only another 0.4375 inches was added yesterday by the storm that had been prognosticated by meteorologists to be the so-called knock-out punch. In my corner of the 90026 that knock-out punch only brought the cumulative amount to 2.34375 inches.

Well, yesterday was bigger than the day before, but both combined just barely topped Monday’s rainfall total. All in for yesterday: 0.6875 inches for a three-day accumulation of 1.90625 inches.

Note: Marker lines are approximations of the previous day’s rainfall. Calculations are made based on differences measured between photographs, not lines.

Given the increased intensity of Tuesday’s meteorological activity, I was expecting to find a substantial amount of rainfall added to yesterday’s. Nope. This morning I found only  0.25 inches had been captured, bringing the two-day precipitation total for the corner of our front yard in the 90026 to: 1.21875.

With storms lined up and on approach to Los Angeles like a series of jumbojets coming in for landings at LAX, of course I placed my trusty high-tech Precipitation Collection Apparatus in prime position to accumulate a sample measurement of the rainfall coming down on our Silver Lake house in the 90026.

In roughly the 24-hour period commencing 2 p.m. Sunday, January 17, the tally stands at 0.96875 inches* that descended through an opening in the container measuring approximately 3.25 inches in diameter.

*Measurement takes into account the bottom of the container and the 1/16th inch gap between the ruler’s edge and the zero mark. Yeah, I take this crap way too seriously.

From my vantage point beside the 10th-floor window of my Westchester office, if today’s wet and wild weather could be put to music it would be a meteorological mash-up of the Eurythmics’ “Here Comes The Rain Again,” and The Association’s “Windy.”

Haven’t seen conditions this steady and unsettled in years, and it seems as if the storm’s just getting started.

Anyway, here’s about an hour’s worth of what landed against the glass, macro’d, timelapsed and sped up to 60-frames per second:

It’s always a treat to look out our north-facing windows after a storm such as the one earlier this week and see the distant San Gabriels dusted with snow. Not counting this past Thanksgiving weekend in Death Valley with its various blanketed mountain ranges, nor my trudge through the slush at the summit of the park’s 11,049-foot Telescope Peak the day before my 42nd birthday, the quick-melting vistas framed by our windows are literally as close as I’ve regularly come to the stuff since a weird winter trip in the mid-80s to Lake Arrowhead when some friends and I drove all freaking day pretty much to throw a snowball and play some video games and then drive home.

For my only white Christmas celebrated I have to hop in the wayback machine to the magical one spent with my aunt, uncle and cousins in Chattanooga, Tennessee, when I was seven.

So foreign is the substance to me that I can remember an episode in my pre-teens, coming home from a cold morning’s deliveries of my Hancock Park-adjacent-adjacent Herald Examiner paper route and rushing in to urge my mom to come see the patch of snow I’d passed that must’ve fallen overnight a couple doors down from us in the alley behind the duplex we were living in a couple blocks south of Melrose. Reluctantly she followed me outside, took one look at the pile of slush on the ground and promptly schooled me on what in reality was the dumped remains of a neighbor’s freezer frost before heading back inside shaking her head wondering what kind of urban idiot she’d raised.

Well, I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to replace all those variousdistant and weak and lame encounters with a mind-blowing one of literal snow-overload in less than two weeks when mom, Susan and I head to the winter-fied wonderland of  Yosemite National Park not only to experience its magnificence for the first time courtesy my mom, but also to enjoy the Awahnee Hotel’s famed Bracebridge Dinner, an extravagant tradition since the historic place opened back in 1927.

The once-in-a-lifetime event has long been on my mom’s list of things to do, but tickets for the dinner are on a first-served basis and historically sell out quickly. This was evidenced at the end of 2007 when in the week after that year’s Christmas I called and found it already sold out for the next one. Somewhat skeptically, in May of this far more troubled economic year, I visited the website and found space still available. So I called my mom and she said let’s do it, and reservations were done for what I expect will be our most amazing Christmas ever.