InsaneJournal

Current mood:

impressed

it rained yesterday
I woke up at 5:30 yesterday, as is my wont on Tuesdays and Thursdays when I have class, and it was pouring rain. The road was hard to see, which is bad in the mountains, and surprisingly deserted; I found out later that the whole school district had canceled classes due to widespread power outages including the high school, accidents on the roads, and concerns that students might not be able to get home again if the roads got closed. Our schools pretty much never close on account of rain; I've certainly never heard of it before.

Crossing the campus to visit a friend and spend some time fully warm and dry mostly saturated my backpack and completely my pant legs. That building had ceiling tiles, which flapped scarily in the wind; my friend felt that a horror film in which people sitting under the flapping tiles disappeared when the scary noise happened would be good, while I kept uneasily glancing up in case a monster poked its head through. Returning for my next class got my hat (a sturdy fedora) and my stubby ponytail soaked through, and finished the backpack, which began to drip out the underside. I investigated the possibility of eating lunch in the cafeteria, which I usually hate, but it was crowded with students who'd had the same idea, so I wound up camping out under the library instead -- my investigations required me to wring out my hat brim again. Also at this point it became impossible to keep the water out of my shoes, because the ground was one big puddle. Matisse, when she arrived, told me that it had been raining about an inch a minute at home, and though our school's closer to the sea and thus usually has milder weather, it didn't seem much different there. At least the power wasn't out (though it was in downtown the-town-my-school's-in.)

The buses were all but empty, partly because there were no high school students out and partly because people whose bus stops had no shelter mostly seemed to have stayed home. The bus leaked in several places; a seat in the back had a large puddle in it that I found kind of impressive in a "holy shit, what D-:" kind of way.

Got home and the power was out, of course. Set nearly all of my clothes out to dry in front of the just-started fire, because the only garment that had not been penetrated completely was my leather jacket (which I had gotten some water in, in the sleeves and pockets, nevertheless) and so the only dry clothes I really had were my underwear and shirts. I was pretty glad the roads weren't closed, I'll tell you.

A sinkhole opened up in front of the house, so a bunch of water was running into it and under the road in a somewhat frightening fashion. My dad got on local TV when he went to get sandbags to fill it in so the huge stream of water would go across the top of the road instead.

I'm a fan of rain in general, but sweet Mary queen of Arkansas was that a lot. And now it's sunny and pleasant as though it never happened, except there's still a lot of water on the ground and in the trees and all the dead needles got blown out of said trees onto the ground.