|
rain from above Four in the afternoon sitting on my deck reading about Australia. To be more precise I'm reading Cold Beer and Crocodiles by Roff Smith. The man rode his bicycle around the rim of Australia starting and then finishing in Sydney. It only took him nine months to do so. Right now in my reading he has reached the Kimberley section of the continent and is heading south to avoid the monsoon season. ... Milwaukee experienced its first real summer thunderstorm today and I think that the local news overreacted. Every single channel had a crawl message or a special bulletin with an excited weatherman reading the latest report. To me this causes more panic than needed and I didn't have to go far to see an example of it. There was a knock on my door. It was my neighbor from downstairs. She wanted to know if I had heard the siren. I hadn't. Then she wanted to know whether or not we should be in the basement. I said that we could if we wanted, but I wanted to stay upstairs and watch. Yes, I imagine that that might sound dumb to some people, but my house isn't exactly located in a lonely field. The house is well inland surrounded by other houses. The odds of a funnel cloud forming over my place are very slim. She was quick to point out that last year a funnel had struck part of south Milwaukee and went to the basement. I stayed upstairs. As you can see I am still alive and got to see a mediocre light show. As for the winds most of the time they were below forty miles per hour. There were a few times when they were more, but I didn't see any damage to the neighborhood. ... I guess that after reading about the Wet season in Australia any rain that we got today seemed so petty. I mean we didn't even get twenty inches like they did in Texas last week. I should also mention that twenty inches is not uncommon during the Wet season in the northen part of Australia. In fact it happens every year there. Part of me would like to experience the Wet just once in my life. When I was growing up I remember my grandpa talking about the monsoon season in the Philippines and it was the most exotic thing that I had ever heard. Stories about the jungle seemed so far away sitting in their house in northern Wisconsin.
|