...the camera took a bath![/caption]
How to describe last night's rain? As I tried to get an interesting photograph of what was admittedly rather uninteresting -- neither that heavy, nor that fast. -- good old Rob McKenna came to mind. He's a character in Douglas Adams' five-book trilogy The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
McKenna is a long-haul truck driver who hates rain but can't escape it. He has no idea he's actually a Rain God. All the clouds want to follow him and shower their love down on him.
The following is an excerpt from Chapter Two of So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, the fourth book of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy.
Rob McKenna had two hundred and thirty-one different types of rain entered in his little book, and he didn't like any of them.
He shifted down another gear and the lorry heaved its revs up. It grumbled in a comfortable sort of way about all the Danish thermostatic radiator controls it was carrying.
Since he had left Denmark the previous afternoon, he had been through types 33 (light pricking drizzle which made the roads slippery), 39 (heavy spotting), 47 to 51 (vertical light drizzle through to sharply slanting light to moderate drizzle freshening), 87 and 88 (two finely distinguished varieties of vertical torrential downpour), 100 (post-downpour squalling, cold), all the seastorm types between 192 and 213 at once, 123, 124, 126, 127 (mild and intermediate cold gusting, regular and syncopated cab-drumming), 11 (breezy droplets), and now his least favourite of all, 17.
Rain type 17 was a dirty blatter battering against his windscreen so hard that it didn't make much odds whether he had his wipers on or off.
He tested this theory by turning them off briefly, but as it turned out the visibility did get quite a lot worse. It just failed to get better again when he turned them back on.
In fact one of the wiper blades began to flap off.
Swish swish swish flop swish swish flop swish swish flop swish flop swish flop flop flap scrape.
I awoke to frost, breakfasted in a restaurant's idea of hot, dry comfort, and binned through the alleys of Fairview long enough to feel the warmth of the sun overtake the earlier chill; I felt positively over-dressed by the time I cashed in at the bottle depot at Ontario Street and 7th Avenue. Later, when I was locking up my bike two kilometres or so west, at Broadway Avenue and Spruce Street, it was raining -- coming down buckets actually, but just on me -- the Waves coffee house was having a power-washing crew over to hose down their awnings, windows, and sidewalk furniture.
That's over and done with now. All of us are sitting in Waves drinking our coffees and playing on our laptops. The sun just glares at us hotly through the windows, as if to admonish us for not being outside on such a nice, sunny day. Click the images to enlarge.[caption id="attachment_7881" align="alignnone" width="497"]
Oh don't mind the bike and trailer guys; they're both used to getting wet.[/caption]
A description of the weather thus far, today, here in beautiful, Vancouver, British Columbia, makes a better word cloud than sentence.Here weather should be spelled "whether," as in whether or not it will rain. Well, we've had lots of rain, in a wide variety of styles, and we've had chilly, cool, warm, overcast, hot, and sunny, and we've had it all mixed together -- what they call a real unsettled day. It seems to be settling down now, to be a calm, late Spring evening.
[caption id="attachment_2049" align="alignnone" width="497"]
Puddle fun. A building manager seemed to think I was up to some kind of funny business.[/caption]