I am a solar-powered person, and as such, winter is often a difficult time for me. Not just the short days, but the dreariness: grey skies and — at least theoretically, since I’ve come to live in the Bay Area — frequent rain. It makes me grumpy, and I long for sunny weather.

Of course, this hasn’t been so true of late. Not just that we’re in a drought, and saw almost no rain last winter, but my response to it. A month or two ago my mother asked whether we were still having “beautiful weather” out here. I said that at this point, my notion of “beautiful weather” is a nice steady downpour. Rain is no longer a cause for complaint; I feel like I ought to be grateful for what we get, and (so far, anyway) I am.

We’ve just been through a spate where it feels like the dry spells are things that interrupt the rain, rather than the rainy spells interrupting the dryness. It is, in a word, a godsend, and I hope it continues — though as my husband pointed out, the real question is how much snowfall the Sierra Nevadas are getting. What falls on the Bay Area as a liquid right now is nice, but what falls on the mountains as a solid is what we’ll be using all next summer. I’ve glanced at some sites trying to answer that question, but they’re all geared toward skiers, and I care less about how many lifts are running than about where we stand vis-a-vis the averages for this time of year. I feel like this much rain here must translate to some amount of snow inland, but I don’t really know the weather patterns of the region well enough to be sure.

There’s a storm coming in soon, though, and apparently we’re at risk of flooding because the ground is already saturated. This actually sounds like a good thing to me. (Much better than the kinds of floods Dallas is prone to, where everything runs off because the ground is so dry and hard, and the storm so brief and fierce, that nothing has time to sink in.) It’s a price to pay, of course, but if I have to choose between saturated ground and the winter we had last year, I choose the rain, every time.

Even if the weather does get me down sometimes.