Today's Daily Double is... thunderstorms that commit!

It has been "raining" all week here, if you can call it that. Bay area rain just hovers. It dampens your jacket over four hours and never once thunders, and this morning, watching it not-quite-fall on Richardson Bay, I got homesick for weather with some spine to it.

I grew up in Cary, North Carolina, where a summer storm was an event. You could see it coming, the sky going green-black over the pines, the air getting thick and still, cicadas cutting out mid-note. Then it committed. Real thunder, real rain, red clay ditches running like chocolate milk, and forty-five minutes later it was gone, sun out, steam off the driveway, and you went and stood barefoot in the warm runoff because you were nine and that was the law.

The geologist in me knows the boring reasons the west coast gets its water the way it does. The kid in me keeps score differently.

Still, the drizzle falls on my roof, and my roof floats, and the tide came up under me twice today without me lifting a finger. The south got the better storms. I got the better seat for watching them not happen.