Tag Archives: rain

Rain Falling in the Dark

Posted on by

After dinner I checked the NOAA website, as I often do, to see what might be in store in the next few days. It told me to expect rain tonight. I said this to my son. His response: “I want to hear it start raining.”

After I put him to bed tonight, it started raining. He missed it by maybe ten minutes. He may even have been awake still when the rain started to fall. Now it drips onto the deck, slowly drumming away the paint. I will go to bed listening to that.

Maybe it will still be raining in the morning. My little guy can listen to it then as he wakes. If the rain has stopped, my guess is he will have forgotten his comment from the previous night. Another day it will start raining, he will listen to it and, even though he does not know I am watching, he will plaster on a big old grin.

Getting Muddy and Gathering Trash

Posted on by

Those were the two highlights of the day.  My wife went skiing for most of the day.   I stayed home with the children.  We stayed inside for a bit to let them get their craziness and creative play out.  Then we had lunch of tortillas and cucumbers.  Then we headed outside.

We took a walk down the road.  We spent a good deal of time exploring the ditch that runs along our road.  The town road crew has spent lots of time over the past couple of years clearing and improving road drainage in town.  Last year they got by our way.  The ditch is filled with ice, which is covered in sand and dirt, which is mostly just under the surface of the flowing melting snow.  I was cautious about letting the children walk on it at first but it was solid and we hopped back and forth all down the road.

We also picked up trash which consisted mainly of discarded beer cans and bottles.  There were many.  The children had fun both spotting them (“I see one under that bush!” “That one is buried in the sand!”) and fishing them from their various hiding places.  We couldn’t carry them all so we set up stations of them along the roadside.  We wouldn’t have been able to carry them back either so we left them to pick up later, cairns of aluminum and glass for drivers to wonder about.

We cut across the field to get back home.  It was rutted and frozen and muddy and wet.  Not all in the same place, of course, but we found some mixed terrain.  By the time we made it back, the children were wet and muddy.  “My feet are chilly,” explained the boy child.  His boots were soaked through.  Plus, he hadn’t bothered to wear socks.  Despite this, they stayed outside for a while before heading in to clean up.

They played outside together for a good chunk of time after they did get cleaned up.  Then they had to clean up again.  They each went through three sets of clothes today, not including the pajamas they wore this morning.  They got wet and muddy more than once.

Last summer I bought a pair of tall rubber boots.  They were one of the best purchases I have ever made.  Those things can take me anywhere and I am confident going.  Hike across a wet muddy field?  No probs, babe.  Step in a ditch of meltwater?  Easy.  Hike to meet the bus in the rain?  You bet.  Those puppies served me well today.

Tomorrow I will need to head down the road and collect those bottles and cans.  I hate seeing all that garbage on my road.  What gives with someone who will toss their empties for someone else to clean up?  That’s crap, if you ask me.  Heck, even if you don’t ask me, it’s still crap.  In any case it will give me a good excuse to take the kids for another walk.  Maybe we can see if the spiders are still crawling all over the grass by the big culvert.  And if they don’t want to come with me, it will feel good to gather the refuse and see that it makes it to the recycling bin.

Somebody’s got to take care of the empties.  If the end user won’t do it, that selfish butt, I will take it on myself.

Poor Snow

Posted on by

Rain.  That is what we have gotten the past couple of days.  Butt.  That means the snow has been slowly melting away.  Of course, it also means our driveway has gone from way too icy (Daddy! Our driveway is just like the ice skating place where they played hockey!) to sort of icy and also sort of muddy.  That is a bonus.  At least I won’t slide off the driveway like my wife did the other day.  Four wheel drive low comes in handy, baby.

Rain.  That is what is falling now.  It sounds kind of soothing falling from the eave to the deck.  Last night the children and I lie quietly together, just listening.  It was soothing last night as well.  Too bad it didn’t help them fall asleep earlier than usual.  So much for grownup time once they are asleep.  Maybe tonight.

Skiing ought to be crappy this weekend.  Warm air, more rain, that is what the forecast has to offer.  We definitely won’t be doing any cross country skiing in our field like we have been.  I finally busted out my skis, a graduation present from my parents twenty years ago, and had a great time zooming up and down.  I even knew which wax to use, even though I haven’t used those skis in a couple of years.  Red did the trick with temperatures in the 30’s.

Temperatures are still in the 30’s.  And did I mention it is raining?  I love rain.  I just wish sometimes it would hold off until spring really is ready to arrive.  It’s a little early for things to thaw.  I am guessing we have some snowstorms yet to come.  Then I can bust out the cross country skis again.  And the children and I will turn on the light over the deck and, instead of listening to the rain, we will watch the snow falling through the beam.

I guess whatever weather we happen to get, I can’t really lose.  That’s a deal and a half.

About the Weather

Posted on by

We are planning to take a trip down to Connecticut to visit my parents and other sundry relatives this week.  You know, celebrate the national holiday about the mythic sharing of the harvest between the native people who managed to survive the plague brought by Europeans and a group of those Europeans seeking freedom of religion.  I hope we get good driving weather.

I think about the weather a lot, and I especially think about it during the transition seasons such as November.  This morning as I drove home after dropping off my son at his, as my wife referred to it last night in our daughter’s parent teacher conference, “foo foo la la” preschool, I heard on Vermont Public Radio that the weather forecast might be “complex” today but it was pretty nasty 58 years ago.

Apparently, they had a big storm back in 1950.  The Great Appalachian Storm brought snow and high winds to a huge area of the northeast.  Burlington had sustained 72 mile per hour winds with gusts up to 100 miles per hour.  Hello hurricane, although it was technically an extratropical cyclone.  It had more of an effect on other states, including New York, but damage was extensive in Vermont.  It was one of the biggest storms of the century.

It was pretty mild today.  I ate my rapidly cooling lunch as I walked out to meet my daughter off the bus for her half day of school today.  It was a little windy and the spitting rain was misting my glasses.  I even grumbled about it for a moment, until I realized that I did not want to be an ass.  What is a cool lunch when it means being on time to meet my kid?  I had no blizzard to contend with.

We should have fine weather for driving this week.  Rain continues to drip out of the clouds at the moment.  We might get more of that.  My car’s wipers, although brand new, seem to be–how to put this eruditely?–sucky?  They will get us through.  I’m not going out to buy new ones at this point.  Too lazy.

I will keep an eye on the weather for now and when we get there for the ride home.  It won’t be long before we are thinking about snow days.  We talked about the possibility that school might be closed today if the weather turned just right.  Soon soon

The Pilgrims and their native hosts had a mild first Thanksgiving although, to be fair, it was in October back then.  It looks like this one will be pretty mild as well.  We will have no century marking storm, which is good.  If we are going to have a big storm, let’s hope it happens during the middle of a week of school.  That way we go out and play when school gets canceled.

Night Coming Early

Posted on by

I pick up my son from school and it is pretty much dark.  Not long from now it will simply be dark, rather than pretty much dark.

He wanted to play outside when we got home.  His usual play spot these days was in the dark.  And it was raining.  We bagged that idea.

In our upstairs play room/office we have poor lighting.  This is no problem in the summer.  Tonight it was a little dim.  We need to get some lamps.  It is not as much fun to play with the trains when you can hardly see them.

We turn on lots of lights these days.  We save a lot on electricity by having poor lighting in our house.  The downside is that we have poor lighting.

It is now 9:00 PM and way dark.  In the summer I might just be coming back from a run.

Winter is pretty much here.  Not long from now it will simply be here.

Bring on the snow.

Umbrella

Posted on by

Exactly a year ago I got a new umbrella.  It was a gift from the organization that provides my employment.  it bears that organization’s logo.  How nice, I thought at the time, this might come in handy.  Then I stuck it in the closet.

These days, it does come in handy.  This morning, for example, I used it.  We walked as a family out to meet the bus.  We have a long driveway and the walk is a great way for us to start the day.  It is a ritual I like to be part of as often as I can.  Today the rain was just dumping down.  So we used the umbrella.

It is a golf umbrella, with no metal struts or stays.  It is lightweight.  And it is big.  The wind blew and the rain came down, but it protected us well.  If I had not received this umbrella we likely would have thought that we needed one for our daily walk to the meet the bus, but we would not have purchased such a good one.

We would have purchased something smaller, weaker and simpler.  It would probably have been cute or brightly colored but it would not have been nearly as functional.  This one works like a charm and looks sharp as well.  It was a fine gift.  It gets a lot of use.  I am glad I have it.

Tomorrow we have our annual meeting to review the organization’s standing and direction.  It will be a day to mingle and maybe learn a few things and even have some fun.  And I imagine we will get some employee gift.  The umbrella will be hard to top but I have high hopes.  One year we got coolers and mine gets used regularly.  So the track record here is spot on (OK, the exception was the car emergency kit, which was a great idea but contained a plastic bag of drinking water, just in case one of us happened to go off the road in the winter and need some ice).

I foresee we will receive a practical gift, one that will get used rather than tossed in a closet.  But even then, I can always pull it back out, right?

Clothesline Success

Posted on by

The rain stopped some time in the night but we ended up getting a lot of it, 3/4 of an inch to an inch.  Things were wet this morning.  But the sky was clear and the wind blew.  It was a perfect day for the clothesline.

I got the first load of laundry in early and I was out by 10:00 AM.  OK, this may not sound early, but the sun doesn’t swing around to hit the clothesline until after 9:30, so it was just about right.  I ended up getting in three loads of laundry and hanging it all on the clothesline today.  The first and second loads were not a problem but by the third load I was running out of space.

We have one of those spider web type clotheslines, what they call an umbrella dryer.  I had to pull down some of the lightweight items that were dry from the first load both to create enough space and to provide the clothespins to hang everything.  We had waited all week–longer actually–to do laundry and we lucked out with the weather.  I just needed to puzzle out how to make room for everything for our family of four, including children who love mud.

Here is the basic set up:

Umbrella That Won't Work in the Rain

Umbrella That Won't Work in the Rain

The thing is, I love to use the clothesline.  It is meditative, I suppose, whatever one may think of that term.  I love the smell of wet clean clothes and the feel of sun and wind as I hang them.  I like to take the time outside to avoid using the dryer.  We have a dryer and we use it, but I am not a huge fan.

I like the clothesline because our clothes feel better when they have dried in the air.  I like it because our clothes last longer.  I don’t need to iron my shirts if I hang them out.  And best of all, we save energy.

Whenever I use the dryer (think January, cloudy, light snow, ten degrees) I have pangs at the electricity we use.  The clothesline gets the job done for free, with no air pollution and no wasted energy.  Is that a bargain or what?  My breakfast fuels the job, rather than Hydro Quebec’s dams or Vermont Yankee’s nuclear plant.  Seems smart to me.

I did spend some time today strategizing how to get it all done.  If the laundry stays out too late, the dew sets in and the drying gets negated.  I zipped out ten minutes before we planned to leave today (for a Halloween parade no less) to make sure I took down everything I could.  But in the end it all got dried, folded and put away for the next wearing.  I took the last pair of jeans down just before the sun ducked behind the trees.

I did wear mud boots to hang the shirts and towels and sheets.  The rain may have ended, but it left behind some saturated ground.  At one point I dropped a dish towel.  It was instantly muddy.  Now that’s a functional towel, I thought, if it can soak up moisture that quickly.  I held off on hanging that one.  It made its way back to the laundry bin.  It will have its day in the sun the next time.

Pie and Kites and Rain

Posted on by

So we had this fall/harvest/Halloween shindig this afternoon and it was a blast. I spent about four hours in the kitchen making soup and pie. The soup was pretty easy and relatively quick. The pie took a while but I managed to make two of them, apple of course.

The first pie was a recipe from a cookbook (or most of a recipe). It has cheddar cheese right in the crust and the usual truckload of butter, a dash of cinnamon, vanilla, sugar. I used mostly Macintosh apples but I also added a bit of Honey Crisp, since we had a few of those hanging around the house. It turned out well, as it has for me in the past.

I made the second apple pie with a crust recipe my mother gave me years ago. That crust contains vinegar. The pie was all Macs this time but I spiced it differently, with a little cinnamon but also with cardamom. It, as well, turned out to be a winner.

I made both crusts by hand, literally. Instead of using the food processor shortcut, as I often do, I worked the dough with my fingers. This makes a far better crust, even better than using one of those pastry cutter jobbers. These crusts, while different, were flaky and tasty. They held up but could be peeled apart. They were crispy and sweet. That worked for me.

Once the soup and pies were consumed and the children were rounded up and the conversations ended and the gang took off, I did what any party host does. I cleaned. But then my son suggested we go fly kites, so I dropped the sponge and headed outside.

The wind was blowing from the southeast and it was strong. We got a couple of kites in the air for a little while, but the wind was fickle. We had a few nosedives. Plus, it started to rain. As the rain fell harder and harder, the wind petered out more and more. I brought the kites inside to dry and we called it good. I hung them in the mudroom. One of them has a long tail, maybe fifteen feet, so I had to drape it over multiple hooks.

Now, after dark, the children tucked into bed, the rain falls hard. They fear the power failing. Before bed they asked if it would go out. What could I say but what I always say? “I don’t know,” I told them. They fell asleep anyway. They sleep to the sound of rain and wind. And I think about having another piece of pie.