Alyca's Daily Life

Funny article in the paper about todays rain.........


Looks like rain has violated terms of the truce
There was a moment about a week ago — I think it was Day 18 or 19 — when I'd had enough of this rain.
I was driving and the air was weeping. Water filmed the car, yet there were no drops, no pattering sound. It wasn't rain so much as a mass dew attack. I like the rain, or so I say. But suddenly, it was too much.
There's a scene in the 1997 movie "The Sweet Hereafter" in which a man drives into an automated car wash. He sits, listening to the radio, as jets of water course over his car.
As you watch, it hits you: He's been in there too long. He's stuck. Yet the water keeps coming. Wash, rinse, repeat. Water is no longer his ally, his car-cleaning helper. It's the enemy. He becomes agitated and starts honking his horn. Nobody hears him.
That's how I felt last week — like I was trapped in a hostile car wash.
Assuming it's still raining today, which seems a safe bet, then this is Seattle's 26th consecutive day of rain. It's our second-longest rain streak on record. The longest is 33 days, in 1953.
I'm no mossback. But I thought I had made a truce with rain years ago. I'm happy when it starts up in the fall, and warmed by the sound of its soft drumming on my roof.
But I also hustle to get out of it. I use umbrellas. I try to stop it from leaking in my basement.
The rain people tell me I've been going about it all wrong.
"You've got to give yourself over to it," says Nick Bond, a Seattle research meteorologist.
Bond bikes to work every day. He gets irritated when it stops raining. He says people like me are doomed to traverse the five steps of a Seattle winter: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.
The rain's relentlessness will wring acceptance out of you, one way or the other. So you might as well just start there.
"Get in it," he says. "I find it helps to keep a dry pair of shoes at the office."
Another rain freak, Shoreline writer David Laskin, 52, suggests becoming a rain connoisseur. These past weeks have offered up a dazzling array of rain varietals, for those discriminating enough to notice.
Drizzle. Mist. Warm, soft rain. Cold, hard rain. Laskin recalls "rain bands" and "sheets of rain."
After nearly a month straight of rain, yesterday's forecast had the audacity to predict "increasing rain." And the quirkiness to call for "scattered sunshine."
"One of my personal favorites is a gentle rain, the kind that just sets up and keeps going and going," Laskin says. "You know, when it's raining, but it's not really raining? I love that.
"Of course, my wife thinks I'm nuts."
On Day 24, I went to Myrtle Edwards Park, on the waterfront. Sky and water were identical shades of dreary. The rain was vaporous. It was like being in a terrarium and getting misted by a giant spray bottle.
I'd left my umbrella. In five minutes I was drenched.
That night, I was in our bathroom and caught myself listening for the telltale patter on the skylight. Nothing. I craned closer, searching the window pane for sprinkles. It was dry.
Did I want it to be raining? Is the rain now a companion so constant that when it isn't there, I feel a sense of loss?
I searched the sky. The moon was out instead. It glared in my eye like a spotlight and I turned away.