The sky just opened up again and now the light is a curious pale shade of green.

I've always liked the rain and I love thunder and lightning, but since the storm-related damage here in January it's a little worrying, and I'm getting a little tired of it.

Oh dear. The rain coming down now isn't so much falling as it is being thrown down, with a velocity seemingly higher than gravity could generate.

The news says that this winter is not as wet as that of 1997-1998. I was living here on the hill then too, and I don't remember it being like this. I can't remember any winter I've spent in Los Angeles that was this unrelentingly wet. I've spent winters in Denmark and France that felt drier than this.

The difference there of course is that it doesn't stop when the winter stops. It just keeps raining. And raining. And raining. That dull, constant, mute rain that becomes part of the daily texture of life. Loud storms and furious rains weren't so common. How I relished them when they materialized.

I can remember one dark Sunday afternoon in Copenhagen, standing on the balcony of my apartment, watching the sky grow blacker as the branches of lightning shot down into the ground and the sea. I'm easily enthralled by such things. I can stand and watch a storm for a very long time, and that one was really special; one of the best. No sooner did it abate than I was on my bicycle and out in the country for one of those bracing, two or three hour rides I would take, back when I hadn't completely shaken the will to race out of my bones, although I would never race again. I just didn't know it then.

Riding through the glistening countryside north of the city was a near-daily fixture for me, but riding through it with the dark mountain of clouds moving off over the horizon, pushed away by the low, silver sunlight of a Danish autumn was something special, a day and a ride that stands out among so many hundreds of beautiful days and rides.

It's odd how so many of my favorite rides were in complicated weather. Sure, there were countless great rides in perfect, clear sunny weather--in Marin County, LA, Denmark--and a day or night at the outdoor tracks simply doesn't exist if the weather is bad. But there was always something strangely exhilarating about riding in heavy weather. Including snow and below freezing conditions. Or fog.

There was a lot of that in and around San Francisco. Starting a ride in the cold, needling blanket of fog that clung to the bay and continuing north through Mill Valley and ascending Mt. Tam only to shoot up out of the fog and into the sun as if passing through a floor is something magical. Turning around and going back down with your hands and face going numb once you've crossed that boundary in the other direction is another kind of crazy, hurtful magic.

Danish rides didn't offer such thrills, but there was a calmness, and a quiet, composed beauty to that rolling countryside that is difficult to find here, and no storm moving off into the distance is beautiful quite in the way as one you can watch reflecting off of shimmering fields and the gentle green mounds of waving grass.

Ah. It's stopped raining. Time to go to the hardware store.