In our little corner of Southern California, my wife and I grow a little garden to supply ourselves (and the *&%$-ing rabbits) with a few fresh fruits and vegetables. This can be very expensive though, because the plants all want water and, oh boy, water ain’t cheap! However, this weekend a miracle occurred … water literally fell out of the sky! No one could believe it. People were so stunned, they even seemed to forget how to drive.
The oldsters said this used to happen a lot and called it “rane”. Old people are always making up stupid stuff like that though. Even so, I’ll keep hoping this “rane” will return again and again! Free water! Free! Boo-yah!
Heh heh. This reminds me of the first snowfall of winter. I live in a temperate climate; I can’t remember any winter that did not have at least a little bit of snow. Yet every year, without a single exception, the arrival of the first snowfall causes a strange form of amnesia where the entire state forgets how to drive in the snow. Inevitably, people will default to one of two different behaviors: either they drive with reckless abandon, having completely forgotten that snow & ice are slippery (if you listen hard, you can hear them crash further down the road), or else they don’t dare drive above 5 mph (maybe 10 on the freeway), even if the road has been plowed & salted and is perfectly safe, for fear that Certain Doom[sup]TM[/sup] is about to befall them (if you look hard, you can see the wide-eyed terror in their eyes). Sure, there will be a certain amount of people who just moved in from warmer climates where it doesn’t snow, and 16-year-olds for whom this is their first winter driving. But it’s not just those people; it’s the whole damn state.
When we moved from a desert climate to lush greenery, we were impressed with the green of the grass of the house we ended up buying. My wife asked if there were a sprinkler system installed, and the realtor looked at her like she was nuts. She had to explain that out here, they take care of watering by just having it fall out of the sky on its own.
I have, many times in my life, listening to people complaining about a rainy day, reminded them that water is the only substance in the universe that they absolutely need to live, and the stuff just miraculously falls from the ski, clean and pure, regularly, everywhere, and places where it doesn’t are usually uninhabitable.
I’ve described the DFW branches of these factions thus:
Lunatic: “Huh. I dunno what to do in this stuff, so I’ll just drive like always. Ooh, a curvy overpass–better slow down to 65.”
Panicked: “Wet stuff fall from sky. Ug scared! Ug hide behind wheel and drive like blind turtle!”
And yes, all it takes is rain. You don’t want to know how they drive in snow and ice. Sensible people stay home, ideally in the parts of their home farthest from the street, just in case.
Driving aside, congratulations to Greg, recipient of this bizarre, yet generally beneficial phenomenon. Remember, don’t try to vacuum or repaint your lawn until it’s completely dry.
Lawn? What is lawn? We don’t get enough of that majical water falling from the sky to waste on grass here in Arizona. Unless people pay money to hit a little ball with stick so that course owner keeps it watered.
Hence the painting and/or vacuuming. And I’m not talking about this fancy-pants stuff–back when I first saw it, some joker had painted the hard-baked bare dirt bright green. The vacuuming refers to someone who had made a lawn out of astroturf or some knock-off thereof; it looked like he had just rolled out a big square of dusty green carpet in front of his house.
I’m in Wisconsin, when we get a few inches of snow in a short period of time, I do feel bad when I see Florida or some of the other deep South plates out on the road. People that may have never ever driven in the snow and literally don’t know how to do it (or may be decades out of practice having retired down there and just back up to visit family and got caught in the snow).
