One of my favorite things to do growing up was to read outside on the covered balcony of my grandparents’ house when it was raining.
I went through so many cheesy crime novels on that balcony — mostly P.D. James and Donna Leon.
This was an expensive habit too, because my grandparents live in a village in Germany. I could get English-language novels from a bookstore in a nearby town, but these were nearly twice the cost of German paperbacks.
I look outside, it looks like rain, but I want to walk the dogs around lake Calhoun, so I check weather.com.
Weather.com says 0% chance of rain.
I look outside again. It looks like the storm before the kraken, but weather.com says 0% chance of rain so I TRUST THE INTERNETS and drive the dogs to the lake. If weather.com had said 1% chance of rain I would not have gone out, but ZERO percent chance…well…I can’t question that!
The skies look so bad on the way to the lake that I expect Nicolas Cage to hop out of a building and give a dead-pan account of how “supernatural whatsits were coming to take over the who-hah…” And of course, the second we get to the lake:
Fail.
I check weather.com on my blackberry. It says 75% chance of rain, plague, and pestilence. I feel like an idiot.
And then Harley glares at me like, “OKAY, FOOL, I NEED TO PEE. BEHOLD MY DROOL.”
And after much fretting, I finally take them out. It rains harder just to spite me. Nicolas Cage warned me of this but no…
After our walk on the set of Umbrella, Harley gives me another glare like, “WHY WOULD YOU TAKE ME OUTSIDE IN THAT BULLSHIT? BAD OWNER! BAD!”
Ugh. I’m damned if I do…
And I am not taking them to Lake Calhoun anymore because it took far too long to clean the back seat of my car after these two hot-shedding-messes…ugh. Never again.
It’s a rainy summer.
The first picture is the flag outside of work. I can only see a segment of tinted1 sky from my cubicle. I think it’s better that my cubicle isn’t closer to the window because office life is already distracting, and I would get nothing done if I could zone out by looking outside.
Miami weather sucks during the summer – it’s hot humid, and there’s downpour every afternoon.
First world problems.