The Weather

So yesterday morning, we woke up at five o'clock and I thought Tommy was switching the lights off and on.  Tommy doesn't actually switch the lights off and on (that would be Lulu) but he does wake up at five o'clock lately (we need to invest in black out blinds for their room), so it wasn't completely irrational.  I would actually say that it was a fairly respectable thought process for so early in the morning, honestly.  

Anyway, it was actually lightening!  And there was thunder!  And it was raining!  Hard!

So, TAISM canceled school.

I was supposed to get my driver's license, and so we piled the kids into the car and set off.  I'm not scared of rain, you see, as my childhood in Seattle proved to me that I do not melt.  (It just really makes my hair look bad.)  We got out of the Wave to the first roundabout, and guess what? It was flooded.  I was following Eli who fearlessly and rather quickly plowed through it, so I did too even though it was deep.  I had the radio on and Chris Fisher In The Morning was schooling us all on driving with ones' headlights on rather than ones' hazards (the use of hazards in Muscat is ubiquitous and most commonly means "I am slowing down, please slow down too so that you do not rear-end me") because when you use your hazards, my fellow Muscat drivers, nobody will know if you're going to turn because you can't indicate.

And I actually said aloud to Chris Fisher In The Morning, "MY GOD, you are totally right.  Good point!"  (Note:  I already had my headlights and not my hazards on, so this was a bit wasted on me.)

The driver's license didn't happen because none of the guys actually made it to work, so rainy was it, and so I took the kids to the grocery store and came home to hang out for the rest of the day until we went for a walk and saw a rat climb up a palm tree.  Awesome.

This morning, I looked at the newspaper (yes, we bought a subscription and yes, we recycle it unread except for the front page every day), and imagine my surprise when I read the beginning of an article about the weather:

Following the rains of yesterday and the last few days, people here hope like last year extended winter weather in the Sultanate is in store for all.  After the recent rains in different parts of the country in general and in the Muscat governorate in particular, the city wore a cheerful look with a sense of palpable excitement everywhere in the air.  With the recent onset of springtime, the incessant showers and hopes of extended winters, people are in a mood to celebrate life and hence one can see families returning to picnic spots.

!!! While those sentences are about as far from clear as a writer could get, it is, I think, undeniable that the author means to convey a sense of joy and happiness due to the rain.  I have two comments.

First, this Seattle girl lacks that feeling in her emotional vocabulary if you will.  Rain in April means you feel sad.  (Though you save your deepest sadness for rain in July.)

Second of all, these people are only happy because nobody goes to work when it rains.  (And possibly because it feels a bit less oven-like outside.)