Expanded Rain Protocol in Everyday Ramblings

We are having WEATHER here.

On Monday midday I sort of idiotically chose to walk home from the studio not realizing how hard the wind was blowing the rain. I had on what I call my rain protocol but even though I had my teaching notes in a plastic bag in my pack and my wallet and phone in the pocket of my waterproof jacket things inside still got wet. Walking over the Hawthorne Bridge was pretty intense and circumventing standing water is a logistical challenge.

Four hours later it was not raining and I thought oh good and threw my teaching notes in my pack and a couple of hand towels to dry off my mat if it started to rain again. When I got to the church where I teach my notebook was soaked through from water earlier in the day.

This is just a microcosm of what everyone here is dealing with…alternate routes, extra protection, luck, prudence, extra forethought and common sense. A woman a few blocks from here had a large tree fall inches in front of her. A tree that ended up blocking the road for a few hours. Up on campus we had a mudslide and debris in the road.

Things are, (how do you say?) effortful.

But folks, including me, are also saying, it could be worse, at least here in town. It is worse in many outlying areas. Keep your fingers crossed for above freezing temperatures. Everybody’s biggest nightmare, ice is on the horizon. We are just in this weird zone here where we don’t get serious winter weather and so when we freeze we don’t have the equipment or the expertise to deal.

I have been looking at some rare photographs of the 1894 flooding here. Residents were very creative, building precarious walkways and taking boats downtown for Christmas shopping.

I am struggling trying to take pictures that are reflective of the tone here now, dark and wet and with cheerful colored lights popping up everywhere. We did have this miraculous break in the rain yesterday and don’t tell anyone but I saw a little bit of blue sky!

Still, saying that, overall I am teaching more students than ever before and for the first time this week, since I taught at work, a couple of years back I get to keep the donations my students put in my tip jar.

With the impending foray into Modern Dental Science I need all the financial help I can get.

I listened to this story that touched me this morning about Syrian refugee families living in Lebanon, not able to work legally and having to pay rent and getting further and further in debt because of the cutback in food aid by the U.N. This linked to a story I heard the other day about a municipal budget (smuggled out) for a town in Syria that was taken over by the radical fundamentalist group and a huge percentage of the budget was documented as “confiscations”. And that linked to a couple of other stories about how the “fighters” are living in confiscated housing with as much food as they want. And wives are assigned to them.

And one smuggler, mostly arms, who was asked to obtain a friendly house cat for a fighter who missed his because the Syrian cats are not…well…friendly.

There are poems in there as well as in our flooding and the flooding of 1894.

I feel weirdly like I am being a traitor to my avocation of poetry by not writing enough lately. I need to figure out a way to balance the ever-increasing demands of work and teaching with writing.

Just as soon as I figure out how to keep the things I carry in my pockets dry…

Last updated December 10, 2015