If it is Winter, it will rain--and if it is Summer, it won't rain, and you cannot help it.
You never need a lightning-rod, because it never thunders and it never lightens.

And after you have listened for six or eight weeks, every night, to the dismal monotony of those quiet rains, you will wish in your heart the thunder would leap and crash and roar along those drowsy skies once, and make everything alive--you will wish the prisoned lightnings would cleave the dull firmament asunder and light it with a blinding glare for one little instant.

You would give anything to hear the old familiar thunder again and see the lightning strike somebody.

And along in the Summer, when you have suffered about four months of lustrous, pitiless sunshine, you are ready to go down on your knees and plead for rain--hail--snow--thunder and lightning--anything to break the monotony -- you will take an earthquake, if you cannot do any better.

And the chances are that you'll get it, too.
San Francisco is built on sand hills, but they are prolific sand hills.
They yield a generous vegetation.