Epic hailstorm or neighborhood animal roof party?
Last night around midnight, I went to bed, so exhausted I could barely keep my eyes open.
Sometime in the middle of the night—I want to say 3 a.m.ish, but I may just have made that up—there was a barrage of loud thuds on my roof. In my sleep-addled state, having just seen Ponyo (more on which later), I was certain that someone had summoned a vast herd of small sentient rocks.
It happened again and again. Probably half a dozen times. By the fourth or fifth time, I was barely awake enough to decide that it must be a storm with extremely loud rain. Maybe hail? Big hail, and my roof had turned to tin?
I turned on my white-noise generator. Overwhelmed by the return of the roof noise. Turned the white-noise generator's volume way up. Roof noise still louder. Put in earplugs and turned up the white-noise generator again, and finally got back to sleep, though that may just have been that the roof noise didn't come back after that.
Now it's 8:20 in the morning, and I've stopped sleeping, but I'm barely more awake than I was when I went to bed.
I looked outside, and everything is wet, but it's not inundated. The skies are gray. Weather.com's hourly report for the past couple days seems to indicate that there's been no precipitation here at all in the past 24 hours, unless I'm misreading it, which is entirely possible, seeing as how I'm basically asleep. (But there's supposed to be thunderstorms later today. Impressive, given yesterday's clear blue skies and warm sunshine.)
I've been awakened by small animals (presumably squirrels) running across my roof before. But that's only ever been one or two fast traversals of the roof, and one or two animals. If last night was animals, then it sounded like dozens or hundreds of them, swarming across the roof over and over.
All of the above explanations seem equally unlikely. Any of you locals hear anything?
It's also entirely possible that it was just a small rain shower and that for some reason it sounded very loud to me. If so, I'm going to need to do something about it before the rainy season starts, because I won't be able to sleep in this house if that's what rain on the roof sounds like.
