Rain!

Okay, rainy season is upon us with a vengeance. Thunder, lightening, pouring rain, and then bright sunshine a little later. It's quite exciting, actually.

The other day was very unique. Usually when a thunder storm is brewing the clouds boil and brew and eventually roll in, blocking the sun and turning the inside of my bright home dark and dreary. You can actually feel the electricity built and crackle in the air and on your skin. What made last Monday unique is that this didn't happen when the lightening came.

I was just standing up from the kitchen table to bring my plate into the kitchen when I saw a bright flash outside, brighter than the sunny day it was, and there was a HUGE boom. I jumped in my skin so hard that I almost dropped my plate. My helper, Ami, was outside hanging clothes on our metal clothes dryer and she said she jumped right off of the ground.

A few hours later, Ami came and told me that a tree 4 houses down from ours had been hit by lightening, and when I looked you could see branches and leaves everywhere. The next day I drove by and, from a different angle, saw the tree like it is in the photo. That's the closest I've ever been to a tree being hit by lightening. Apparently they heard it at the school and some of the kids screamed and dropped to the ground; others said it was no big deal. I guess it depends on where you were at the time.

Today as Ami and I were driving the usual 6 minutes home from the local mall, we ran into a flood. It had been raining the usual noontime deluge and I figured we'd spend a bit of time running errands in the mall and then return home quickly. Not a chance. It was like a water main had broken or something, although I tend to think that the something is more like inadequate sewage drains. We had to merge into 6 lanes of traffic (seriously) that bottlenecks into 2 lanes (but traffic here remains at about 4 lanes still, with motorcycles weaving in and out). My concern was that the water would get into our engine and we'd stall, but after carefully weaving in and out, avoiding the biggest muddy lakes, we made it onto our main strip to go home. Surprisingly, that part of the road was flooded as well, and what is usually a one way road became two.

It could have been a stressful time, but I had no where to go, we didn't have ice cream or frozen veggies melting in the car, and I had Third Day on the cd player. We sat, inched forward, sat, moved our side mirror in so that we could squeeze a little further into the bottleneck (that's whatcha gotta do here), and people-watched. A little boy in an angkot, a station wagon-mini bus type people carrier, contributed to the water flow with his own yellow flow; students from the university were taking off their shoes, rolling up their pant legs and still getting their pants wet when trying to maneuvre in between all of the cars to get to the 'other side'; motorcycles were SOMEHOW squeezing between cars to get ahead; policemen were knee-deep in water directing traffic; umbrella boys and girls were not getting much work because there was a greater chance of getting wet feet than a wet head. I wish I had my camera.

Thanks for reading.