First post!

Hello friends,

On my third day in Manchester, no rain fell.  It was sunny and clear most of the day, and the red brick buildings looked beautiful against the blue sky.  I decided now was the time to start a record of my experiences here in this new (to me) country.  About the rain... I'm from LA, where rain is so rare that it always feels like a special occassion.  Now I'm living in a city where, according to http://www.holiday-weather.com/manchester/averages/ , it rains 265 days a year.  That's greater than 70%!  According to the same site, LA gets only 37 rainy days a year, although I feel like even this might be an overestimate.  So one could dwell on all the gray, rainy days here, and Manchester suffers a pretty poor weather reputation even within the UK, I want to focus on the positive in this here.  The dry days, the sunny moments between rain showers, and even the feeling, deep down in my desert memory, that rain itself is a good thing and shouldn't be taken for granted.