Thursday, April 18, 2013

Rainy days on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays.......

This is beginning to look like a common occurence on our local tv weather forecast:

The current proof is upstairs dripping in the bathtub - my husband's pants.    I called him at work a little before six oclock to see if he was coming home for dinner.  The rain looked like it was just west of town, so he decided to leave right then and try and beat the rain home.  He said it wasn't raining when he left work,but started within a block.  When he got home he was drenched all the way through.

Liz, the Education Director teaching in the barn, because, well, it was wet outside!

It was just the latest in a week full of rain-altered events.  On Tuesday Mike and Pete went out to Eagle Marsh to lead a hike.  They ended up staying in the barn the whole time because of the weather.  On Wednesday Pete and I went out to lead a hike of preschoolers.  Though the weather turned out well, the prediction was for storms, so the teacher cancelled.  This morning the prediction was again for storms and I was quite surprised to wake and find the sun shining.  So off to the marsh we trekked.  The wind was really gusty, but the temperature was in the 70s by the time we got there.

We took our two groups of preschoolers out looking for animals, their secondary signs and for shapes in nature.  Each child wore a necklace with shapes on it:  circle, square, rectangle,star, triangle, oval, diamond.   The tree branches were round on the end.  The animal burrow was an oval, the goose's beak was a triangle, the dried Queen Anne's lace was the shape of a star, square and diamond shaped rocks make circles when thrown in the water.  And we talked about the beaver that killed a giant cottonwood by eating off it's lower bark, but found all the things that still make a home in and on the tree and it's bark.  Red Wing Blackbirds were out in full force and the kids loved learning about a bird who had name that made sense.  And apparently its distinct call sounds like a cell phone.

Pete and I had lunch with us and planned to hike on the marsh after the program, eat lunch and make our way over to the library where his art class meets on Thursday afternoon.  But of course...the weather interupted our plans.  We found out a storm was moving in, so we took a shortened hike, accepted a ride over to the library and figured we'd wait out the storm there.  But that storm didn't come.  The ugly black clouds just moved overhead, so Pete and I ate our picnic outside the library in the wind, but the temperatures were warm and comfortable.  We finished up and headed inside, an hour early.  We found plenty to do, and Pete made his way to class.  While we were there another set of black clouds moved in and this one unleashed lots of rain.   We left to go catch our bus during a let up, and by the time we got home the rain was steady, but not torrential.  And there were plenty of puddles for a splash-happy nine-year old to find.

I made dinner and had the ill-fated conversation with my husband that leads off this blog entry.  He came home looking like the helmsman on Noah's ark - in a word- wet.  This is the kind of experience that makes a lot of people say they couldn't take public transportation or walk, they need a car - to stay dry in this kind of weather.   As I let my dog out earlier this evening, I looked across my back fence and saw that my neighbor had left the windows down on his car.  Just proving, that there is more than one way to get wet!

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