Overcast and feeling like rain this early Thursday up here on California’s north coast, a sense hopefully that really does pan out — big wet weather set for tonight and on into the weekend.

Forecasts indicate 3 to 5 inches of rain between now and Sunday with heavy snow in the mountains, and “…we should see a parade of steelhead making their way up every coastal river in Humboldt and Del Norte Counties.”
Some sections of the Eel, Van Duzen, Mad and Mattole rivers were closed last week to fishing due to the low-flow threshold of water, and accordingly, were to remain that way until late March. The drought keeps keeping on…

Meranwhile, just to showcase weather weirding, the US northeast is being slammed again by snow, sleet and ice, an on-going situation which has lead to a rock-salt shortage.

(Illustration: Pablo Picasso’s ‘Musician, Dancer, Goat & Bird‘ found here).

The salt is used to keep roads open, but too much white stuff creates a big-big demand:

“We’re just continuing to get crushed by these storms. With major rock salt shortages, it’s starting to get scary out there,” said Anthony Scorzetti, a hardware and paint manager for Braen Supply in Wanaque, New Jersey.
“I have people calling from all parts of the East Coast looking for it, and we just have nothing.”

Nothing, too, is water sources for a small town about two hours south of where I’m at, a poster-child of climate change and drought.
Willits, in central Mendocino County, is a focal point of how this dry shit is eating into living:

Just south of Willits, in one of the state’s most verdant corners, crows and other birds peck at dry ground that should be covered in water at the city’s Centennial Reservoir, which is less than a third full.
The creek that feeds it has slowed to a trickle.
“It’s common at this time of year for the water to be going over the cement wall right here. In fact, we’d be standing in water,” said Bruce Burton, a Willits city councilman, gesturing toward the small cement dam in the creek.
“In the 20 years I’ve been in local government, we’ve never experienced this kind of condition.”
While rain is predicted through the weekend in the north and central parts of the state, California remains in the midst of an historic drought.
The state’s Department of Public Health says 17 rural areas including Willits — a town of about 5,000 that usually sees about 50 inches of rain a year — are dangerously low on water, and officials expect that number to grow.
In addition to declaring a drought emergency, California has canceled water deliveries from the state’s water system to farms and thirsty cities and shut down fishing in dozens of streams to protect imperiled salmon and steelhead.

Even those little glasses of water at a dinner out, taken for granted in better times, but water is still water no matter the circumstance (via NPR):

Across the state, towns and cities are looking for ways to prod businesses and consumers to cut back on water use.
Some cities’ water-rationing plans are even aiming at restaurants, many of which routinely waste a lot of water every day when they dump out the glasses customers leave on the table.
“The water left on the table seems like such a small thing, but it’s something that adds up over time, especially if the restaurant has busers refilling glasses,” says Angelica Pappas of the California Restaurant Association.
Santa Cruz is one of the first cities restaurants from serving drinking water unless diners request it.
The restaurant chain F. McLintocks in San Luis Obispo doing it, too, KSBY News reports.
At the state level, restaurants aren’t huge users of water, of course — it’s farmers who are the water hogs, guzzling 80 percent of the water in the state.
And even inside the restaurant, some 84 percent of the water use happens in the kitchen and the bathroom, the Environmental Protection Agency.

So, what to do?
This week, President Obama did a little rain dance of sorts, setting up so-called climate “hubs” around the country to help regions work/handle a changing environment — but WTF?

Start dancing…