Rain keeps a-fallin on my head

My favorite and least favorite thing here is this blasted rain. It's just as cold as it looks--and wet--and sandy. There's sand everywhere; on the beach, at the park, in the yard, under the faucet in my bathroom, in piles at various locations on my porch and on my carpet. Right now I despise it. In Nebraska I had resigned myself to the cold, and I didn't mind it as long as I was prepared for it. I had wool socks, a warm and cute hat, glove, and scarf trio, and a snugly warm coat to shield me from the blasts. Here, I just can't seem to get it together. Maybe it's because it was 73 degrees last week and today it's 53. I can't adjust to the constant changes. And the rain comes on with no warning, mainly because the fog is pretty consistent so the overcast skies are no cause for concern. Until you realize the rain is creating a lake in your courtyard and all the door are open, your shed doors, the sliding doors, the car doors... It's a surprise attack every time.
They told me it would come with the winter; I scoffed at the thought of winter in Southern California. Most of the people I talked to upon initial arrival are not California natives, which made me leery of believing anything they told me to expect. For one thing, it never got up to 100 degrees on Labor Day Weekend, so I tossed all the other warnings out the window too.


Technically we're not in Southern California; they call us the *Central Coast* which means we have no pride in being So-Cal or Nor-Cal. What would we paste across our cars' rear windows, *Cen-Co-Cal*? I don't think so. We just flounder in the middle, enduring the pelting rain and sludgy sand. It shouldn't last much longer I'm hoping, but I have nothing to go on here.


What I love is that occasionally the power goes out and we're sitting in the dark biding our time until it comes back on. Our delicate little reservation just can't handle the 90mph winds and steady drizzle. What happens in my house is the same every time: the lights flicker before a heavy blanket of darkness, Tre screams for seventy seconds, Leila cries in panicked response to the darkness and the screaming, the other three yell at Tre to stop screaming until I bellow from my post for the chaos to stop. Next the kids scramble around together like detectives looking for their Nintendo DS's for light, which can be a rather timely chore. I feel my way to the kitchen and begin lighting candles, strategically placed throughout the house from experience.

The last time this happened, I had just set dinner on the table and was in the middle of changing a diaper. Dale was at work so the kids and I had a candlelight dinner, which was good because they never would've touched the vegetable lasagna otherwise. (This way they couldn't see what they were eating.) I did all the dinner dishes, a rare task now that I have discovered the wonder of using the dishwasher, and headed out into the rain and across the lake to the shed, to dig out more candles so we'd have enough light to work on a puzzle. The last time the power went out, it didn't come back on for twelve hours. Needless to say, after the dishes were done and the candles were out from underneath six boxes, there was a great shout of rejoicing in the house as the lights powered back on.

It's kind of like back in grade school when you'd have an inside recess and the teacher would pull out a stack of board games, a bucket of bean bags, and pour a mountain of crayons on the coloring table. It was exciting just because it was something different. Even though I don't do the same thing every day, the scenery never changes, especially now that we're scheduling our grocery shopping trips instead of going ten times a week. Functioning in the silence by candlelight is incredibly therapeutic. I definitely need that more often, so bring on the rain.