Where's the rain?

Here it is!

Wow. Totally wack. January and February are unseasonably dry and sunny up here, and in Death Valley it's been storm central. There are even lakes filled with rainwater! Well, for the next couple of days, at least.

There's a drought emergency in Washington State, BTW. Farmers out on the eastern half won't have enough for as much planting as they'd like to do. As for the western part, well, we're being told to not wash our cars and "brush every other tooth" (Thanks, Gov. Gregoire. That makes a lot of sense.) No problem with the first part of that. Probably ought to step up the dental hygeine, though (smacks fuzzy, latte-d tongue against roof of mouth).

I'm most interested to see what will happen with the formerly tiny and still completely insane town of Bonney Lake, however.

Bonney Lake perpetually runs low in its water reservoir over the summer. The area has just developed exponentially over the past decade. It went from nothing to the state's fastest-growing community with a rate hovering above 50 percent for the past couple years in less than a decade. Its infrastructure is in straits — dire ones — when it is overburdened with the California transplant yuppies that work in the tech industry in Seattle and Bellevue to the North.

Well, Bonney Lake has to decide how to keep up with demand in the summer. In 2003, that meant tapping a well that had manganese and iron deposits in it. The water was sludgy and brown, smelled funny and tasted terrible. Residents had to bathe in it and they didn't come out clean. Worse, some residents said their water heaters were ruined by all the sludge gunking them up.

So Bonney Lake didn't want to go through that again. Best ask the city of Tacoma for some emergency supplies for 2004, right?

Or not so right. Because some wackos that are still fighting the anti-fluoride crusade live out in Bonney Lake and they stormed the city council. I know, I'm a journalist, I'm supposed to be objective, but for Christ's sake, we're talking fluoridation here. Where are the mind-controlled Soviet zombies you nutcases promised us back in the 1950s? Fluoridation works, knuckleheads. Deal with it. And while you're at it, quit driving whitetrash redneck 80s-model Crown Victorias, Bible yuppie unconcerned with passing a camel through the eye of a needle SUVs, enormous jacked-up trashy pickups and other smog makers, which are actually producing carcinogenic pollution, you fathead hypocrites. Get the government out of your water AND your right to pollute the heck out of the air? Get with the program, homunculi.

So the cro magnons demanded the city not use Tacoma water (from the fresh banks of the Green River, after which the serial killer was named) which is fluoridated but rather the stinky water with manganese and iron and gawd-knows-what in it. Because nutso psycho John Birchers haven't bothered to study the effects of what may happen to their thyroid should massive doses of other kinds of metals whop it.

There was some internal debate. I forget how it all came out; mostly I was shocked that this blue state would have pockets in the western, true-blue part about fluoride, of all things.

So I'm curious to see what will happen.

Heck, the Green River's snowpack is low. Tacoma might not extend the courtesy at all.

Ah, what a summer we have to look forward to.

Does this post make me sound like a 70-year-old man or what????