It's been raining pretty steadily, very heavy at times, since yesterday afternoon. The weather service says we should expect this to continue for at least a week, but it could go on for up to two weeks.
I mention this because it hardly ever happens here, and if people weren't truly in danger from mudslides in the burn areas (including my parents, their entire neighborhood, and a lot of my friends) it would be incredibly amusing to watch the local media go apeshit on STORMWATCH!!1!1, upgrading 4 inches of water in a street to a torrential river of death and destruction.
Seriously. I am not making that up. I saw it on the news earlier this afternoon.
For about thirty minutes this morning, though, a bunch of kids from down the street didn't think of the rain as a destructive force, as much as a way to propel their paper boats downstream, while they "accidentally" stepped and jumped into the water.
While I watched them play, I remembered building and teaching my boys how to build little paper boats for days just like this one, stomping through puddles long after I was old enough to know better (like into my 20s), and dancing in the rain with my wife, just because she asked me to.
The storm seems to have slowed down for a minute in the time it's taken me to write this post. The sun is trying to push through the clouds, and if I look out the window, I can see patches of bright blue appearing to race across the sky toward the mountains. The water in the street has slowed to a trickle. It's the calm before the next storm, which is supposed to arrive within a couple of hours.
I think I'm going to go make a paper boat, so I'm ready to meet it when it gets here.