The night the rains came down

I have class every Wednesday and Thursday night from 6:30 - 9:15pm. I hang around after work two days a week until my class starts, then I walk over to my class around 6:15pm. Last Wednesday as I walked to class, I noticed that it was a beautiful evening. Fall has FINALLY come to central Texas, and the weather was cooling off. Nobody told me that it was supposed to rain.

About 30 minutes after class started, I heard a funny noise outside. Turns out it was raining. And in Texas, rain means a different thing than it does to you Yankees. I've been Oregon, I know that to you guys, a light rain ALL DAY is rain. Here we just call that "humidity." In Texas, when it rains, we don't have cats and dogs falling from the sky, we have cows and steer. It was POURING outside, and we could barely hear each other trying to discuss Beloved over the sound of long-horn-steer-sized rain drops hitting the cement outside.

Fortunately, about 30 minutes before class was supposed to end, the rain let up and I began to hope that I could make it back to my car through a light sprinkle (or what everyone else calls "heavy rain"). At around 9:10pm my professor started wrapping up the discussion.

~ Side Note: Hey you. Yeah, you. That guy. That one guy that when the professor says with five minutes left in the class, "Does anyone have any other questions? Anything else you want to discuss?" you raise you hand. And you do not ask what we are reading next week, or if you can talk to the professor after class. No, you say, "I'm really intrigued by the idea of love in the novel. Blah blah blah, pretentious sounding words, blah." FREAKIN' STOP THAT. ~

Just as we finished hearing from pretentious guy, the sky opened up again and it started pouring. I walked to my office in the pouring rain (with no umbrella, thank you very much sneaky Mother Nature). I collected a few things from my office, locked up, then got to walk to my car in the rain. No, scratch that walking thing...You know when you used to play Oregon Trail and you had to "ford" the river in your wagon and almost everytime you lost an ox? Yeah, I did that. There was a huge rushing river of water traveling down the hill my car was parked on, so I gathered my belongings and forded the mini-Mississippi. Finally I arrived in my car, removed my prairie bonnet, back out into the river, made it down the hill, and headed off home.

So hey, did you know that you can drown your car? It turns out if you get too much water in your car (for instance, when you drive through several puddles the size of your car, a river, and the pouring rain) then it stops working. Huh. I started off the evening not knowing this, and finished up sitting in the right hand lane just over a rail road track in a car with air conditioning, audio, and headlights all working. But the engine, oh the engine...So, I then had to explain in very calm and dulcet tones to my father what was going on - although, come to think of it, I think might have screamed into the phone: "IT ISN'T FUNNY, COME GET ME RIGHT NOW!!!"

My wonderful sister and father did indeed come out in the rain to rescue me, and the three of us pushed and turned the car in a nearby parking lot. The next day, my dad stopped by the car and the engine started just like normal. And now I am terrified to drive my car in the rain. I think next time, I'll just sleep in my office.

On the bright side, look at what I got on Saturday:

Sir Oliver, or as I call him "Ollie stop biting me!"