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January monsoon
Friday, January 14 2005
Warm rain fell all night long, melting much of the accumulated snow and thoroughly soaking what remained. By late this morning temperatures had dropped into the mid forties and the warm rain had turned into a persistent wet snow that somehow managed to accumulate despite the relatively high temperatures. I took the dogs for a walk down the uphill farm road (the Stick Trail lay beneath a series of rivulets) and marveled at the flooding in the forest. Every landscape depression, no matter how trivial, clutched its very own lake or pond. I wondered about people in low-lying areas. I'd originally had a plan to meet up today with Kathy from the Catskill Animal Sanctuary to talk about the CAS website, but she was too busy dealing with a flooded barn. These conditions made for a good test of all the drainage engineering I'd done in September and October, so I went downstairs to look at the basement walls, which I've still yet to cover with a proper finish. Happily, they were absolutely dry.
Our friends Ray and Nancy arrived at around 8:00pm from Brooklyn. We'd expected them earlier in the day, but they'd had the misfortune of getting lost somewhere in New Jersey. I've been there myself and can tell you it's not a pleasant experience. After another of Gretchen's stellar Quorn-rich meals, we sat in front of the fire and drank beer and talked about such things as the early stage of Ray's career as a high school English teacher in a bad part of Brooklyn. You've seen all the movies that deal with this especially heroic occupation, and you're familiar with the scene where the exasperated teacher hurls him or herself onto a bed sobbing and demanding for God to explain why. Ray is still in that phase. Because troubles in real life take much longer than two hours to resolve, he's yet to have one of the epiphanies that inevitably come in movies.
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