It's Raining Booty

There is always at least one current events topic that you can use to bond with your fellow Washingtonian because Washingtonians are adrift without something to make small talk about. These topics are very important in the cosmic scheme of the universe, whether it's a sniper picking off people at gas stations or how many people would actually notice if there were a baseball stadium in Loudoun County. This week's topic of the . . . week is the horribly osmotic monsoon that's sweeping across our area.

Northern Virginia isn't exactly a temperate paradise of lovely weather, yet the tiniest ice slick or rain storm can throw the entire region into a chaos rivalled only by the human stampede at Walmart on the day after Thanksgiving. Now granted, this storm is fairly impressive -- I've gotten over seven inches of rain since Sunday -- but it shouldn't warrant the federal government allowing people to take the day off or newscasters devoting their entire segment to pools of water that people stupidly tried to drive through. It seems like half of the office took Monday off because of traffic jams on the roads or flooded basements (yet another reason for me to love my ground-floor basement).

Other than the new daily task of draining my planting beds of standing water so I don't inadvertently breed snakehead fish, the storm really hasn't changed much. The odor of humidity hangs in the air at all hours and were it not for the absence of nine-foot cockroaches, I might think I were back in Tallahassee again. Even the cats take it in stride -- they sit in the window and watch the lightning strikes until the thunder gets a wee bit too close and then dash under the bed.

Perhaps I'm just too inured to the danger of low pressure systems. After all, one time in Tallahassee, a hurricane hit the panhandle and went twenty miles inland. If it had gone another five miles and if I had lived on the ground floor with all the nine-inch cockroaches, I would have been a goner!