Posted on 08/20/2022 9:14:31 PM PDT by rlmorel
He and his buddies were so enthusiastic about playing football in the rain. The only thing that could have made practice better that day was mud. Ah, to be 10 again.
It’s rained here almost every day. It is raining right now.
Here in coastal alabama it rains about every dam day! I’m from Colorado originally though, and it’s funny; one time at work on a summer evening we started getting a good rain and people crowded in front of the Windows admiring it...when it snowed? They were like, ‘meh’
On Long Island. Hot. Moderately low rain. But not worse ( or as bad) than many summers I lived through since I joined the planet in ‘49.
We lived in Hawaii when I was growing up. It was in a dry area of Oahu. We always went outside when it rained. It was as warm as bathwater, & it was wonderful.
Your writing is lovely. The photos are gone (for me, anyway). Blank boxes. I wonder if it’s because I’ve just installed an update to my IOS.
As a kid I was a lifeguard and we would get the day off, with pay, when it rained. I have always loved rainy days!
Your culvert (gully washer) story in the Philippines gave me the willies, but not for the pill box (catchment) section, rather the not uncommon practice of using those culverts as open-air toilets!
We had rain from 4 AM to 6 PM yesterday. Nice and low and steady, not the usual all at once for 10 minutes. We need it.
LOL, I get that, but this was on the base, and not used for that purpose there at least. The ones at Subic Bay were used only for rainwater.
When I lived in Japan, they did indeed have open sewers on the base, and we used to flush stuff down the toilet, then run outside as fast as we could in time for us to see the item pass down the street!
I do recall once in the Philippines, I was on some trip somewhere with my two brothers and a Catholic Priest, and we stopped near a small pond. It was a hot day, and I asked if I could take a dip. I was just wearing cutoff jeans so I stripped off my shirt and shoes and jumped in.
As soon as I surfaced, a large caribou came to the surface about 20 yards away, I hadn’t even seen the thing as it was submerged there, but it didn’t bother me. They are generally pretty placid creatures (I may have been 12 at the time) and I was used to swimming and snorkeling alone in the ocean, and there were more deadly things in the ocean, and not just sharks.
But what did totally bug me out was as soon as the caribou’s head broke the surface, it was followed by a billow of greenish brown caribou dung that came briefly to the surface long enough for me to see it before it submerged!
Talk about a quick exit from the water!
Yes! I DO love the rain, but honestly, I don’t want it all the time. Before Bill Cosby became who we now see him as, he did a comedy routine that included something like this:
“It rains so much in Seattle, that when the sun comes out, they all stare at the sky and say “What have we done?”
I just got a notice from Dropbox that they froze my account temporarily due to high traffic.
I don’t think they like me there.
I spent several years south of Lake Erie, it would rain 10-12 days in a row. Like it much better here in New Mexico.
The rain can be awesome when you live in a hot, sweat-inducing climate and air conditioning is not available.
My wife and I went on a sailing trip in the Abacos back around 2004 or so with three other couples on a 42 foot catamaran. It was an unbelievably fun trip.
But there was one day, when it was so oppressively hot, it began to rain, and grew in intensity until we were being deluged.
I have a picture of myself, laying flat on my back on the trampoline, just soaking in that rain.
Bliss. Pure bliss.
My wife and I have visited the Southwest twice, and I think I could live there. I loved the starkness of the landscape and the dryness of the weather.
I could do that...:)
Yes.
I just finished reading a great book by someone who I thought was a Lefty because he was hired into the Obama Administration as a science adviser.
But when I heard him being interviewed, he did not sound like a Lefty at all.
He sounded like a scientist.
A real scientist, to whom the concept of actual science (as formerly embraced by the scientific community) has real meaning and responsibility.
And he was angry at what he sees as “science” today, particularly with respect to Global Warming.
I wanted to read his book to see what this Obama Era official had to say, and he described the difference between “Climate” and “Weather” in this elegant way:
He wrote: “Climate is what you expect. Weather is what you get.”
Brilliant. Just brilliant.
Anyway, you obviously understand that distinction, hence your ability to observe this weather in the appropriate context.
There are so many who don’t.
Hahahahah...I can understand that. I live in New England, and the weather can be quite changeable, and it is predictably seasonal.
I really, REALLY like that. I know people like to live in warm climates all the time and I get that wholly, but I love the seasons. All of them, though I admit, the older I get, the longer winter seems)
But I lived in the Philippines, and I lived in Florida. The sameness of the weather (except for the extremes of the rainy seasons and the typhoon/hurricane patterns, to be sure) seemed monotonous to me.
Though I expect, as I age further, I can see how it will be more challenging and less rewarding!
I’ve been in New Mexico 30 years and live in the mountains east of Albuquerque. Rarely gets too hot or too cold and 40% is considered high humidity. Have to worry about fire and water (wells) but quiet and friendly.
Love it! I LOVED playing football in the mud.
When I was in the Navy as an 18 year old guy, playing tackle football with no pads and helmets, that was as irresponsible a thing as I ever did.
We were playing with a bunch of other high-spirited 18 year old guys, and it was rough play.
I have some great pictures from after I purchased my first SLR camera with a telephoto lens (back in the mid-Seventies) and took some pictures of us playing in the mud...I never developed that film, and it sat in a drawer for nearly ten years before I wondered enough what was on them that I sent them in to be developed...and those were some of the pictures.
My overriding memory of that day, though, is playing center when a guy in our squadron named Faragasso lined up on defense in front of me.
As I snapped the ball, he brought his fists and arms up in front of him while I was still looking down, and he hit me square in the bridge of my nose. (Note-I don’t think Faragasso meant for that to happen, and the fact we didn’t get into a fight kind of buttresses that. When you play tackle football without any pads or helmets, that kind of thing happens.)
I was wearing plastic, black-framed Navy issued glasses that were derisively known as “BCD Glasses”, which stood for “Birth Control Device Glasses”.
Well, when he hit me, those glasses broke clean in half, and the razor sharp edge of one of them was driven into the fleshy area right up above your nose and between the eyebrows.
I got up, that gooey dark mud smeared all over me including my face, and when I put my mud-soiled hand up to my face, when I looked it it, there was blood all mixed in with the mud.
Clutching both halves of my mud spattered glasses, I left the game and went into the barracks to clean up and see if I needed to get stitches. Gazing in the mirror, there was a curved gash about a quarter inch long, but I decided against the stitches.
I got into the shower, where were fed by steam heated, scalding hot water. It was dangerously hot. See, you could adjust it, and it was an endless supply, never ran out.
The problem was, there was a large row of urinals on the same cold water circuit, and when one was flushed, the cold water moderating input in the water mix being sprayed dropped out for about half a second, and the wonderful, bottomless shower changed from nice and hot to 2nd Degree burn water.
And the real problem wasn’t someone flushing one of those urinals while you were showering, it was someone who was focused on playing a “prank” on you by flushing the urinal. People often didn’t flush if they heard someone showering, or would even call out before doing it. But the people who were intent on their “prank” were the real bastards.
I got scalded in there a few times, one time so badly the top of my scalp burned for about a week. I became so tuned in while showering that, if the water pressure dropped suddenly, even if in nearly imperceptible way, I would frantically leap in a panic out of the shower stream to avoid being burned.
I married my wife nearly ten years after I got out of the Navy, and she can attest that we were married for at least 20 years after that before I finally stopped jumping out of the shower any time the water pressure dropped! It took me a long, long time to break that habit!
Anyway, as I lingered in that bottomless hot shower, washing the mud, blood, and soreness from my body, as a final indignity, some joker came in and flushed the urinal and I was totally unprepared. I got burned pretty good there.
And I have since sported a small curved scar dead between my eyes that was caused by the sharp edge of my broken glasses.
With age, it has faded, and I have to look more carefully to see it, but it is still there, and every time I see it, I smile and remember what it used to be like to be 18 years old and invincible...:)
Nice!
Thanks for looking into it. I didn’t know what I had done “wrong”. The fact that it was right after an iOS update made me wonder.
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