Posted tagged ‘rain’
August 15, 2014
It was cold enough this morning that Gracie cocooned, usually one of her winter tricks. She waits until I’m in the bathroom then pushes the covers to the bottom of the bed and nestles in the blankets so most of her body is covered, all except her head and chest. She looked pretty cozy this morning.
This is one of the coolest summers I can remember. We have hit 80˚ maybe three or four times. The rest of the days have been in the 70’s. Perfect weather. Usually August is humid and disgusting, but it hasn’t been except when we’re expecting rain. The nights have been in the 60’s. I have used my AC in the bedroom maybe five times all summer and the central air maybe three or four times. I’m wearing socks as my feet were cold. What’s with that?
Even though we haven’t had much rain, the lawns are green and beautiful. Usually by this time there are browns spots, and the lawns look dry and tired, but not this summer. When the rains come, they are substantial. Last week we got 3 inches in a single storm. Low spots in the roads became lakes or ponds as there are no gutters and no sewers for run-offs. Just up the street is one of those spots, and it always floods. This time it was the deepest I’d seen it in a long while. Cars went around the block to avoid it. After the water disappeared there was mud and sludge across the road.
I used to love to ride my bike through puddles, the bigger the better. As the water cascaded on each side of the bike, I’d take my feet off the pedals and extend my legs so they’d get wet from the rush of water. I aimed for every puddle I saw, and I laughed out loud for the joy of the puddle and the wave.
Categories: Musings
Tags: bike riding in puddles, chilly nights, cocooning, cold mornings, flooding, greenery, lawns, mud and sludge, perfect days, rain
Comments: 12 Comments
August 14, 2014
The White Rabbit and I share the lateness of the hour. My morning has been leisurely. I read both papers and doubt I missed anything happening here or in the greater world. While my English muffin was toasting, I watered the plants. I am such a multi-tasker say I with a bit of tongue in cheek.
Yesterday it poured. I had to shut windows and doors. It was a noisy rain battering the roof and dripping from the eaves. Gracie slept in her crate most of the afternoon. I took a nap, the best thing to do on a rainy afternoon.
Today is another delight. It is in the mid 70’s and will go down to the low 60’s tonight, perfect sleeping weather, and every day for the rest of the week is predicted the same as today though tomorrow night may even get as low as the high 50’s. It feels more like fall than summer especially in the mornings.
Okay, it’s time for a little bit of Ghana here. The trigger was the cool morning, my favorite part of the day in Ghana. Each morning was the same. I’d have my two eggs cooked in groundnut oil as the Ghanaians call it, peanut oil for us, two pieces of toast, wonderful toast from uncut loaves of bread sold from trays balanced on women’s heads, and two huge cups of coffee, bad coffee which I actually got used to drinking. The food was cooked over charcoal on a small round hibachi like burner. The toast was cooked against the hot sides of the burner and needed turning. Boiling the water was first so I could drink my coffee while the rest of my breakfast was cooking. Thomas was my cook. He’d hand me the coffee, and I’d go outside and sit on my porch, no chair, just concrete steps. Little kids would pass me going in both directions. Just outside the front of the school was an elementary school and just beyond the back gate was a middle school. My house was beside that back gate so I could see the students lining up and hear the national anthem before they went into school. The youngest, heading to the elementary school, always stopped to say good morning and stayed a while and stared. A white person in Bolga in those days was still a novelty.
I had a table, a couple of chairs and a refrigerator in my dining area. One whole wall was just screening, no glass, and the floor always got soaked when it rained. Thomas would call me to breakfast. Those were the best tasting eggs I’ve ever had. On my two trips back, I had eggs every morning, and they were as delicious as I remembered. The coffee was still the worst. In forty years breakfast hadn’t changed a bit and mornings were still my favorite part of the Ghanaian day.
Categories: Musings
Tags: bad coffee, Bolgatanga, breakfast, delightful day, English muffin, leisurely morning, multi-tasking, Peace Corps Ghana, rain, sleeping weather, White Rabbit
Comments: 10 Comments
August 8, 2014
My sanity is still in question. I think I look like Barbara Bush with my eyes bulging out of my head. Yesterday a trip which takes at most an hour and a half took three and a half hours. On a normal ride home, I would have zipped through Boston on down to the bridge, but yesterday it took me over and hour and a half just to get out of Boston and not even far out of the city at that. I had to stop for gas and a bathroom break, an unplanned stop as I had expected to be home well before I needed either of those. My friend Tony came to the house twice to let Miss Gracie out and on the second trip he fed her dinner. I, in the meanwhile, was a crazy woman sitting in the car going nowhere.
As I was sitting in traffic I could see lightning bolts coming from dark clouds ahead. They looked like the sort I used to draw with black crayons when I was a kid. They had edges and angles. I liked watching the lightning especially because it was ahead of me. Come to find out, weather was ahead of me the whole time so I missed it all. The cape had torrential downpours and hail. When I got home, my lawn still had snow, and it was cold out, in the high 50’s. Luckily Tony had closed my windows so I avoided a flood. The road wasn’t as lucky. One spot had water covering the road and up and over the sidewalks. I saw the lake ahead of time and slowed down, but a car coming the other way didn’t, and I was blinded for a bit by the water spray from the car as it sped through. I checked my rear view and the car was dead on the side of the road, probably from a soaked engine. I left him behind, turned the corner and another corner and I, both grumpy and exhausted, was finally home.
Today is lovely with no humidity, lots of sun and a temperature in the low 70’s. I figure Mother Nature is trying to make up for yesterday. I’ll take her apology.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: crayons, downpour, hail, lightning, Mother Nature, rain, traffic jam
Comments: 8 Comments
August 2, 2014
It’s raining, and that’s the only sound I can hear now. Earlier it was the sound of the chain saw cutting down dead branches from the giant pine trees in my front yard. Now the lawn is covered in spindly dead branches. Gracie and I watched for a while. I got bored. She didn’t.
The first of my movies has arrived, actually two movies have arrived, both on a single disc. The descriptions on the covers are perfectly wonderful, so bad you have to laugh. The first, The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant, says, “One a Hillbilly Half-Wit, the Other a Psycho-Killer! They were headed for trouble.” The other movie, The Thing with Two Heads, says,”They share the same body but hate each other’s guts!” The premiers, though, will have to wait until next week as this week’s movie night is postponed due to rain.
When I was a kid, I could see the face of the man in the moon. Some nights he looked happy while other nights he looked surprised, his mouth wide open. I weighed in on the controversy and voiced my opinion that the moon was not made of cheese. I guessed maybe rocks and sand though cheese would have been more fun but less durable. I knew there were aliens somewhere on a far off planet who probably didn’t look like us, but I had no idea exactly how they looked or if they’d discreetly visited. For some reason I figured they’d have really bad taste in fashion, and that’s how we’d find them. I’m thinking checkered coats and bowler hats. They’d speak in stilted English and not understand idioms or slang. I haven’t found one yet but bad taste in fashion abounds so I’ll keep looking.
I got to grow up in an age of wonder when trips to the moon were science fiction, and computers were background props in space ships so big people stood upright, ate at a table and slept in state rooms. The porthole windows showed stars and meteoroids which never moved, special effects being what they were back then. I never minded. I had learned early on to suspend disbelief. It made movies so much more fun.
Some of my friends can’t believe the creature features I watch. They talk about the bad special effects, the B actors and the unbelievable creatures. What they don’t know is I can still see the man in the moon and my suspension of disbelief is finely honed after all these years. I know wonder can be found even in a B movie.
Categories: Musings
Tags: aliens, bad taste in fashion, made of cheese, moon and cheese, movie night, rain, space ships, The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant, the moon, The Thing with Two Heads
Comments: 6 Comments
July 17, 2014
The rain was light but steady when I went to bed. During the day it had gotten heavy at times, and I had a flooded floor in the kitchen when I got back from my errands as I had left the back door open. It took a mop. By afternoon the humidity was thick and stifling so I put on the air. The house felt wonderful and I slept until 10, unusual for me. I turned the air off this morning as the day is cooler and less humid than it has been. The sun is even breaking through and the day is getting lighter. I didn’t begrudge the rain. We needed it.
Once I wanted to be Annie Oakley, a horse riding sharp shooting cowgirl who also happened to be the sheriff. I didn’t realize it at the time but she wasn’t stereotypical which is what I think drew me to her. Many of my favorite characters were girls and women who were smart, brave and daring. I loved Lois Lane though I hated those tiny hats, the suits she wore and the purse she always carried. She was dogged in her pursuit of a story and the identity of Superman, and she never let being a woman stand in her way though she did end up being saved time and time again by Superman. TV in the 50’s had few strong women characters. Most, like June Cleaver, wore dresses, pearls and aprons and had dinner ready when their husbands came home from work. Alice Kramden managed to break out a bit. She wore the apron but she was never cowered by Ralph.
As I was growing up, I knew I’d go to college. No one in my family had, but I just knew I would. It was part of the plan I had hatched when I was young, as young as ten or eleven. I’d go to college then I’d travel the world. There was neither doubt nor hesitation in my mind.
When I graduated from college, my mother told that she and my father had never envisioned that one of their kids would go to college. They were both thrilled and proud that I had. Earlier, though, they weren’t so thrilled and proud when I had announced the next part of my plan, traveling the world. My father forbade me to accept the Peace Corps invitation to go to Ghana. I mean really, here I was twenty-one, a few months from graduating, and my father actually thought he could stop me from doing what I wanted. If I hadn’t been so angry, I would have laughed at the absurdity. I ignored him, and he knew I was going with or without his support so he begrudgingly accepted my decision and gave his support.
My life has worked out even better than I had envisioned. It has been so much more.
Categories: Musings
Tags: absurdity, AC, Alice Kramden, Annie Oakley, college, Ghana, humidity, June Cleaver, life plans, Lois Lane, Peace Corps, rain, stereotypical women, stubbornness, sun, travel
Comments: 12 Comments
July 15, 2014
Every day is dark and humid, but we don’t get rain. We just get sweaty. Thunder showers are predicted for the third day in a row. The difference today, though, is a strong breeze, strong enough to sway the chimes, bend branches and swish the leaves. The birds are unusually quiet. The rental next door has people this week, and I can hear them talking and laughing. They interrupt the usual quiet of the morning.
When I was in the fifth grade, we were bussed to school in the next town over while they finished building our new school. That was the year I got Little Women for Christmas, and I remember reading it on the bus. I loved the March girls and how they called their mother Marmee. Beth’s death made me cry. I hadn’t ever read a book before where someone dies. Jo was my favorite character. I wanted to be Jo. As I read the book and got closer and closer to the last page, I remember feeling sad, feeling a sense of loss, but then I found Little Men and Jo’s Boys, a sequel to Little Men. I could stay with the March family even longer. That was the year of Alcott for me.
I still hate reaching the end of a good novel. If I had more self-control, I’d slow down and make it all last longer, but I can’t. It is as if I am possessed. Sometimes I’ll read all day and well into the night, even to the early morning and first light. One Christmas my mother gave me Alive, and I started reading it Christmas afternoon. I was in a reading frenzy, the zone where there is nothing else. There are no sounds and no people, just the pages of my book. My mother broke in and thought I should put the book down as I had just opened it that morning and wouldn’t it be a shame to finish it so quickly. I didn’t know how to answer. My mother was a reader and should have understood. A good book is savored. It trumps everything. It’s a world unto itself which draws us in so we are lucky enough to become a part of that world.
It’s still happens to me.
Categories: Musings
Tags: Beth's death, humidity, Jo, last page of a good book, Little Women, rain, reading, reading frenzy, savoring books, Wind
Comments: 14 Comments
June 17, 2014
The streets were wet this morning so it rained during the night. The morning started out as cloudy, but the sun is in and out so I hope it might just end up being a pleasant afternoon.
That was one exciting soccer game last night. The US scored in just the first forty or so seconds but Ghana later tied the score. After the US broke the tie, I sat on the edge of my seat for what seemed like forever, but Ghana didn’t score. The US won 2-1.
I have only caught 4 mice in the cellar trap. The fourth was released last night. He had been in the trap about a day and was totally scared, even in a panic. It took a while before he’d leave the trap. I hope he finds some friends in his new neighborhood. I’ll bait then return the trap to the cellar later. Mice do like peanut butter.
Every time we went to the beach when I was young, I collected shells and a few dead starfish. The shells I got to keep but not the starfish. They always started to stink and out they went. Sometimes I’d find a really neat stone by the water, a flat, round stone with different shades of gray across it, and I’d save that too. Those shells and stones were my first collection.
I’ve noticed that being a kid and being older have a lot in common. I know if I wore plaids and prints or plaids and poker dots people would just think my ensemble was chosen by an old woman who has lost her fashion sense. When I was a kid, we didn’t have any fashion sense. I wore what was in the bureau drawer, and matching wasn’t taken into account. At stores like Woolworth’s or Grant’s, I always took my time choosing what to buy with my dime or quarter. My slowness probably drove the adults crazy, but I never noticed their impatience. I do notice old people in stores and how slowly they walk or push their carriages, and I’m often caught behind them. They stop in the middle of the aisle. I say excuse me so I can pass but most times they don’t move. I figure they didn’t hear me so I ask more loudly. If they don’t move, I just backtrack and change aisles. I wonder sometimes if I am looking at my future and one day I’ll be in the middle of the aisle. Kids and old people are discourteous at times. I used to think old people felt entitled because they had lasted so long. Kids just do what they can away with doing.
It occurred to me that there is a name for this phenomenon, for this similarity. First there’s childhood then second childhood with all its rights and privileges.
Categories: Musings
Tags: beaches, childhood, Clouds, collections, fashion sense, mice, mouse trap, old people, rain, second childhood, shells and stones, USA soccer
Comments: 6 Comments
June 13, 2014
The rain this morning was heavy for a while. The wind is still blowing. All my windows are closed to keep out the damp cold air. I’m even wearing socks.
I went out for breakfast and brought Gracie. I left her in the car with a couple of windows open. That’s when it started to pour. I had to run outside and shut the windows. Gracie was in the middle of the seat away from both windows. No dumb animal is my Gracie.
I used to love Bonomos turkish taffy. My favorite was vanilla. Banana was my second favorite. Finishing a whole bar was a huge investment in time and effort. To make it easier, I’d crack the bar so they’d be smaller pieces to chew because larger ones took forever. My jaw always got tired.
Fire balls were a challenge. The contest was for who could keep it in the mouth the longest without having to take it out for a breather. I used to move the fire-ball from one cheek to the other hoping it wouldn’t burn as much. My sister put it in a bowl of water so the red would wash off. In actual time, the burning didn’t last long, and the red disappeared, replaced by white. I liked it when the fire-ball finally got small enough to crack with my teeth.
When it came to penny candy, I always wanted the best buy for my penny. I’d look up and down the rows behind the glass counter trying to find the candy which lasted the longest. Even pennies were hard to come by so my candy choice had to be a wise one. Mint Juleps were a safe choice. They took a long time to chew and they had a great flavor. Banana splits were also a great choice. Like Mint Juleps, they took a while to chew. Root beer barrels, Squirrels and Mary Janes were also wise purchases. The only soft candy I usually bought was Bull’s Eyes. I always ate the outside caramel first and saved the middle for last. It was like having two different pieces of candy.
I wouldn’t dare eat most of those candies now, with the exception of Bull’s Eyes. Teeth are hard to come by.
Categories: Musings
Tags: Banana Splits, Bonomo's turkish taffy, Bull's Eyes, fire balls, Mint Juleps, out to breakfast, penny candy, rain, vanilla taffy, Wind
Comments: 14 Comments
June 12, 2014
The morning is chilly, but the sun is shining which gives hope for a warmer day. Rain is coming maybe tonight but definitely tomorrow. I love this time of year when my world is wonderfully spring green.
This morning I realized I know too many useless facts. They are taking up space in my memory drawers, and they don’t seem to have much value beyond a bit of cocktail chatter. Who really cares that the Mona Lisa has no eyebrows or eyelashes? I didn’t even notice until I had read this somewhere. In the shower, most people wash starting head first. I know I do. It makes perfect sense to start at the top and work downward. We all have lyrics in our heads to songs we sang years ago when AM radio was it, was all we had. I even remember the singing commercials. They and the lyrics don’t ever disappear, but ask me state capitals, and I hesitate. Is Helena North or South Dakota? It’s neither. It’s Montana’s.
My descriptive powers are growing in leaps and bounds. Adjectives are my friends. I don’t remember names of famous people as much anymore, but I can tell you how tall they are, whether they have facial hair and sort of describe the movie they might have been in. I read an entire book and forget the title, but I can describe perfectly the plot. The names of authors disappeared long ago. I look to friends for help, and they are as perplexed as I. Every morning I wake up and figure out the day of the week.
I have always been a list maker. Long ago I learned that lists make life easier. Now I find them essential. I keep a grocery list and add to it as I run out of stuff. I have my to do list with items in no particular order or set for any specific day. That’s sort of an out in case I don’t feel like doing anything but lolling. My calendar is a tear off day by day desk calendar with, of all things, a trivia question each day. I put a reminder on my calendar the day before any event because I missed a couple of events by not tearing off the old day. Tomorrow is breakfast with friends.
I think my most important memories don’t ever disappear. They seem to stay around, vivid and almost alive. For the rest of them, there is always Google.
Categories: Musings
Tags: adjectives, cocktail chatter, forgetting, Helena, important memories, lists, memory drawers, rain, showering, state capitals, sun
Comments: 8 Comments
June 10, 2014
If ever there was day to rejoice, it is today. The toothache is gone. The tooth was pulled yesterday afternoon. The oral surgeon, my former student, decided not to wait. He numbed the area, and after a tug, the tooth was a memory.
Today I went to an early meeting and came home and took a nap, the reason for the lateness of my musings. I wonder, though, if three and a half hours still rates as a nap.
I got three phone calls. One was last night from the surgeon and today I got calls from the Care Center and my dentist’s office. All wanted to know how I was doing. I like that.
It rained today, and the day is still damp and chilly. I shut all the windows to keep the house warm and turned on lights to keep the darkness at bay. I am in my stay at home clothes, and that’s exactly what I intend to do.
The other night I made myself a peanut butter and Marshmallow Fluff sandwich. When I was young, it was a snack stand-by. We usually ran out of cookies quickly, but we always had bread to make a sandwich. I preferred marshmallow over jelly because marshmallow never slid out of the bread. Jelly did. It was always grape jelly which came out of the jar in globs and usually ended up on my shirt. The other problem with jelly was it made the bread squishy and the middle of the sandwich sink. There was, however, an upside. My mother bought Welch’s because you got a glass out of the deal.
My niece’s almost two-year old son had a rite of passage a few weeks back. He had his first fluffernutter. It was on his fingers and his cheeks, and he devoured every piece of it. My brother-in-law chronicled the event with pictures. They don’t have Fluff in Colorado so when any of us visit we bring a few jars. It goes quickly. Even my nephew who’s over thirty has a sandwich or two.
White bread is the best for a fluffernutter. I’ve tried it with wheat, and it isn’t the same. Wonder bread was our childhood bread of choice, but you really need a sturdier bread so the marshmallow can be spread without making holes. My sandwiches even now seem to overflow just a bit when you add the top slice of bread. I still get marshmallow on my fingers. I lick it off.
Categories: Musings
Tags: grape jelly, jelly glass, Marshmallow Fluff, messy foods, painless, pulled tooth, rain
Comments: 12 Comments
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