Just a few drops last week in our rain-challenged state. I was surprised when I checked my rain figures that we had 24″ last year, but 41″ the year before. I’m hoping we get more rain this year. The early drops of rain like this are heavenly…the smell…the most wonderful example of this is rain in the Baja California desert. When the rain comes, it’s in big quantities. You can almost watch the desert bloom, and it’s ambrosial.
About Lloyd Kahn
Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the
Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include
Shelter,
Shelter II (1978),
Home Work (2004),
Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008),
Tiny Homes (2012), and
Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:
Just a few drops last week in our rain-challenged state. I was surprised when I checked my rain figures that we had 24″ last year, but 41″ the year before. I’m hoping we get more rain this year. The early drops of rain like this are heavenly…the smell…the most wonderful example of this is rain in the Baja California desert. When the rain comes, it’s in big quantities. You can almost watch the desert bloom, and it’s ambrosial.
Amen
nice picture…makes me smile.
Petrichor!
Thanks wolfhati; didn't know that.
"Petrichor…is the scent of rain on dry earth. The word is constructed from Greek, petra, meaning stone + ichor, the fluid that flows in the veins of the gods in Greek mythology.
The term was coined in 1964 by two Australian researchers, Bear and Thomas, for an article in the journal Nature.… In the article, the authors describe how the smell derives from an oil exuded by certain plants during dry periods, whereupon it is absorbed by clay-based soils and rocks. During rain, the oil is released into the air along with another compound, geosmin, a metabolic by-product of bacteria, which is emitted by wet soil, producing the distinctive scent; ozone may also be present if there is lightning.…" – Wikipedia