let it rain...

This morning was crazy. I happened to glance at my watch and realize that exactly at that moment I was supposed to be leaving for church. I had been so deeply pondering the conundrum of what shoes to wear that I hadn't been paying attention to the time. So I carefully put on some flip-flops (they didn't quite match the mood of the outfit, so I would have been better off with the other pair...) and stepped outside. I then took a deep breath and began my mad dash to church. I am convinced that I broke the sound barrier multiple times (when I wasn't going uphill), which is universally acknowledged to be a difficult feat on a bicycle. Twenty slightly sweaty minutes of burning legs later, I walked into church as if I had just calmly stepped out of my own car and had, wizardlike, intended to arrive exactly on time.

After a delightful afternoon, I sat to do some work, but was periodically jarred out of my concentration by a series of loud, manly shrieks. I glanced out the window to see this:


If you manage to peer past the flower bed right outside our window, you will notice that a few of our boys were really enjoying their football game in the rain, and thought the entire campus would like to know about it.

I remember some wonderful rainy days when I was little. One in particular stands out to my memory...

One spring day, a heavy rain had just cleared, leaving a marvelous, enormous puddle in our driveway. My younger sister and I pressed our little noses and fingers against the window and gaped at the tempting lake only a few feet away. Naturally, being the busybodies we were, we didn't remain at the window, but begged to be allowed to play in it. My mother, like any good mother of young children, outfitted us in our rain gear. We each had little rain boots and rain coats, and my sister had a tiny pink umbrella with hearts on it. We stood in the puddle and jumped in the puddle and threw rocks in the puddle, but my mind was already working on something bigger. I was eyeing my sister's umbrella and thinking how marvelously it would float if we turned it upside down. We dropped the umbrella in the muddy water, and it floated perfectly! I of course, was eager to find out just how our pink, lopsided boat would fare under difficult circumstances, so both of us pulled off our rain boots and began filling our umbrella boat with water. Rain boots are splendid for filling boats with water. I'm not sure exactly when in this process my mother looked out the window to see some drowning little socks bobbing next to a very grey umbrella and two squealing, ragamuffin girls splashing barefoot in the puddle, jeans wet to the knees, thoroughly muddy and bedraggled, and utterly happy, but I am sure it gave her a bit of a start. What good times I had when I was little! I was a crazy little loon, I remember quite enough about my childhood to know that. Would you, parents, agree?

Everyone, life is crazy busy for me these days, but I do hope to get in a more substantial post later this week. I have so many things to say--intellectual things, essay things, things of musing, update-on-my-life things--that I had to make a list of all that I want to tell you. Thanks for reading in the meantime, and please do check back later in the week. =)