Rain Starved - It's 2:30 am, and I just had to get up to write for a moment.

Originally, when I finished my last journal entry, I wanted very much to just crawl in bed, maybe read a short story or two, and fall asleep. Instead, I got distracted by catching up on the daily updates to my friends' journals (and/or blogs, depending on your favorite jargon of the day). Thomas, the helpful darling that he is, introduced me to some humor that quickly shot to the top of my "favorites" list: http://mom2my6pack.blogspot.com/

It all started with an ebay listing for a pack of Pokemon cards. Dawn is a mom of 6 kids (well, 7 if you count her darling husband, dh for short). After another harrowing trip to the grocery store, all 6 kids in tow, she got home and found something tossed into the basket (and purchased) without her notice. So in listing and selling the cards online, she told the story of the entire adventure. People started reading the ebay listing and sending to the link to all their friends. After a while, over 10,000 people had seen the listing and started emailing her, leaving comments on her post, reading her blog, and even offering her book deals, job offers, radio and newspaper interviews. She's done some of the interviews (here's the article in the St. Petersburg Times, complete with the original ebay auction posting text at the bottom of the article).
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Oh. So, all this to say, I was originally going to bed. Instead, I read all the back archives (well, about 20 entries) in Dawn's journal (the humorous mom I was just telling you about), then I finally crawled in bed. Right before pulling back the covers, I heard one of my favorite sounds in the universe: Rain on the pavement outside my open window. This was followed by two other favorite sounds: Cars driving by in the rain and Thunder.

If you've never lived in Southern California, it's hard to explain how rain-starved a girl from Northeastern Ohio can become. When we first moved from OH to CA, we apparently moved at the beginning of a decade-long drought. In my seven years on my college campus, I can remember *one* "winter" season with significant rain. In the seven years I spent with my (now ex-) husband and my step-kids, I can remember again exactly *one* winter season with heavy rain.

Quick aside: That winter's rain is hard to forget. We were renting this "cute" little house [translation: Really Small (TM)]. Apparently the neighborhood possum population considered the drainpipes on the corners of our house the perfect possum-sized toilets. After several years with little or no rain, these drainpipes hadn't been "flushed" in years (please pardon the pun). So when the heavy rains rolled in, the flat roof of our cute home became a lake, something roofs are not usually designed for. All the water came crashing in through the ceiling of the back bedroom, which was really just filled with extra stuff and the computer. Fortunately all the clean laundry was back there at the time, saving me the trouble of having to mop up any water. It all considerately poured into every laundry basket and sat there instead. The ceiling "stucco" came off in sheets on everything else, and I spent the next 3-5 years finding and killing the mold that clung to everything afterwards. But I digress.

And in the seven years since my divorce, only last year was a heavy rain year. We had something like 20+ or 30+ inches of rain last year. Only a few weeks ago, we'd had no more than 2 INCHES this whole year. Two inches!! Two! That's barely an afternoon in some parts of the country.

So here I was, all set to climb in bed, when I heard rain and thunder, just outside my window. And although I just wanted to lie there, enjoying the sound, it took only a minute to realize what I really wanted to do was write and tell you all about it.

Now it's 2:50 am, and I'm going back to lying in bed, smiling at the rain outside my window. I'm glad I stayed up late enough to be awake when there was rain and thunder.

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Today's Blessing That I'm Thankful For: Rain.