There's a decent-sized storm system moving into the Bay Area Thursday and Friday, and for this we should all be extremely grateful. Your rain dances have worked. It is time, once again, to get out those umbrellas, galoshes, and slickers.

KRON 4's weather people are saying we won't be seeing the kind of intense downpours that we saw in the first part of December, but rainfall, particularly in the coastal mountains, will be pretty heavy. San Francisco proper looks to be getting somewhere between two and three inches come Friday and Saturday, so that will be very nice for all the plants.

Hopefully this time no one will lose any power.

The North Bay will see the first of the rain on Thursday, and there will be a chance of urban flooding up there like there was in December.

Up in Tahoe, the first system arriving on Friday and into Saturday may dump only rain, but OpenSnow is predicting 10 to 18 inches of snowfall in the basin by Monday, and maybe as much as 28 inches along the highest elevations.

Also, that same guy at OpenSnow is sounding kind of bullish all of a sudden about precipitation to come, saying that there have been dry spells like January's before.

It is funny the people who are calling Winter over. It reminds me of 2011 when we had a dry spell longer than this one into mid-February, and then over 500 inches of snow on the mountains mid-February through June. Now no one remembers the 6 week dry spell from that year. They only remember the big snows in March. And the same from the dry 05-06 season that ended with 300 inches in March.