Glad the rain is a blessing for you.

It looks like that too often around here.

Nice front yard though.

Eric, nice photo. Glad you got home high-and-dry ... a good day for attending early service ... and for pulling out the old hymn about 'sailors threatened by the sea' ...

It's made for a busy afternoon at the website, but, it's Blessing News as well as Breaking News ...

The rain is a blessing indeed, along with cool weather.

But sometimes it can be a short term pain in the keester. The wife and child are driving back from Ruidoso in the deluge, two dogs are besides themselves with frenzied panic at the storms, and we still have unresolved roof issues. But tomorrow is another day.......

Jim, I'm sure we'd get tired of the rain if we got 50" a year. But you'd probably get tired of the dry weather if you got only 8" a year.

Jeff, I can't wait to see the breaking news reports of another flooded intersection in Odessa, multiple fender benders across the area, and an interview with a long-haul trucker to find out how he (she) copes with driving in the rain! ;-)

Wallace, given how long those "unresolved roof issues" have been around, you're probably fortunate that Julie isn't at home to point them out...again. ;-)

I was surprized by how lush everything looks in the photo (I don't know why). I'm suitably impressed by it's simple beauty.

Rachel, I think a lot of folks have a preconceived notion of how a desert looks. We're not in a Sahara-desert kind of environment; we do usually get around 12" of rain each year, which is generally enough to keep things green if it comes regularly.

The new design is unleashed... ooooooo!

Sleek. Arresting. Coooooool.

I dig the ultra hip fire ant.

Jim, you're too kind. I was posting my discontent as you were leaving this comment.

But, it's a place to start.

It wasn't even the environment per say, it's just that it looks really green! Our street isn't even that green at the moment (but that could be partly because we are in winter lol).

but that could be partly because we are in winter lol).

Yeah, I'd say that makes a difference. Things get pretty brown and dreary looking around here when we get winter weather.

While I'll bet that the rain is indeed a blessing in Hot Dry Country, it was a stone-cold relief to those of us in Hot Damp Country as well. I accept the one-two punch of heat and humidity as the price I have to pay for living where I do, and for eating tomatoes and eggplants that are grown less than 100 miles away, but even with that...yikes, this weekend really, really hurt. Yesterday afternoon the storms rolled in and sat on us for about 12 hours. I've heard rumors that the zillion-percent humidity has finally broken, and I can only hope that that's true.

I think your new template is boss, by the way, even though I am one of those unfortunate IE users subject to the Mysterious Disappearing Blogroll.

Bakerina, I'm with you on that account. The significant upside of living in near-perpetual drought conditions is a relative absence of humidity. We complain when it gets over 50%, and most summer afternoons our humidity is in the low teens.

As blogger pal Jeff will undoubtedly chime in to say..."but it's a dry heat!"

Thanks for the template feedback. I'm working on a fix for the blogroll. The ultimate solution may be for me to visit every IE user in the world and surreptitiously install Firefox as a replacement, but nothing's to good for my visitors! ;-)