Holy Moses! It's ark building time in Bako.
Yesterday we received almost an inch and a half of rain. That's almost half what the city normally receives in a year! It shattered every record on the books.
Viva La Niña!
People always talk about "the fresh smell of rain". But not here. The rain seems to absorb all the crap in the air, so instead of smelling like a cow's ass, yesterday it smelled like a wet cow's ass.
As you can imagine, the city wasn't prepared to cope with the situation. All the streets were flooded because storm drains here were an afterthought and are few and far between. Either the brainiacs at City Hall saw them as unnecessary or they blew the budget for them on booze and hookers. It's corrupt Kern County, so I'm going to go with the latter.
My neighbors did what you would expect in such a deluge... watered their lawns. At first I just assumed they were too lazy to shut off the automated sprinklers but then it occurred to me that perhaps they were just concerned that all the fresh rainwater would be a shock to the system for landscaping accustomed to the swill that comes out of Bako taps. Better to dilute the fresh stuff with the toxins they're used to.
The biggest issue we had to deal with yesterday was the dogs. What is the deal with dogs in the rain? I attempted to take them out several times, but the second they were hit with a raindrop they hightailed it back inside. Needless to say, we had very unhappy (and bloated) dogs for most of the day. If there is any chink in the Theory of Evolution, it's dogs in the rain. One would think that Natural Selection would favor dogs that can pee in the rain. It seems like that would be a useful quality for dogs in the wild. Or Seattle. And likewise, you would think that dogs that can't pee in the rain would die out. Probably from bladder infections. But that isn't the case at all.
Luckily, the weather broke around 9pm and I was able to get them out to do all their business. But now I'm feeling somewhat duped. The dogs had led me to believe they required a 30 or 40 minute walk in order to do what they needed to do. But now I discover that, when push comes to shove and there's rain involved, everything can be accomplished in under 60 seconds.
From now on, whenever I walk them I'm taking a squirt bottle and giving them a little fake rain to speed things along.
