Rain, Rain, O, Glorious &^%$#@ Rain.

The People of West Texas love rain. They become nearly orgasmic over just a little shower, the kind of thing most of y’all wouldn’t even notice—you wouldn’t even have to open your umbrellas for it. But here? Any moisture falling from the sky that didn’t come from the butt of a bird = a Wonderful Thing. A Miracle. A Blessing from God. (Yeah, we actually have billboards—big ones—explaining that if we mend our evil ways, god will send us rain to heal our land. Seriously. I should take photographs for y’all).
And we do need rain.  We do. And every time I grouse about it, I remember Barbara Kingsolver saying in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral—which I didn’t finish, slacker that I am—that it’s amazingly short-sighted and selfish to not want rain for any personal reason when the earth needs it so badly, as if our individual petty desires should carry any weight by comparison. And, oh! do we ever need it. We ALWAYS need it.
But.
I hate rain. I dread it, and I loathe it. We’re getting that steady, slow, soaking kind of rain that’s the very best for the lawns and gardens and every little plant and animal that’s out there rejoicing. It may even heal the long yellow patches in The EGE’s lawn where the long metal panels for the roof burned the grass. It’s cool, and it’s refreshing, and I’m just sitting here bitching like a motherfucker.
Know why? Wish I had the energy to get up and find the digital recorder and figure out how to embed some audio here so you could hear THE DRIP DRIP DRIP of the WATER GOING INTO THE BUCKET under the LEAK IN MY ROOF.
Yes: Leak. In. My. Roof.
That would be The New Roof.
Two leaks, actually, although one has not, so far, begun to drip. It’s just making two long wet spots on the ceiling.
For all of my married life, I have had leaks. When we lived in The Mobile Home, the roof leaked. When we bought this house, the studio flooded when it rained—the backyard slopes toward the house, and this little addition is on a slab, rather than pier and beam. The EGE installed a sump pump outside, and when it rained and I was working, I’d sit here and listen for the pump to kick on. If it didn’t, that meant that we’d have to go out and bail. Just lovely. I have done some bailing all right:  with buckets, in the rain, standing in water up to my knees.
Then Bill and David built the Flood Abatement Patio for me, complete with slope and two drains, and that has worked marvelously.
But The Cat Palace leaks like a sieve:  it comes through the fence and runs down to the floor. It gets in their food and in their litter boxes, and The EGE has to go out and mop everything up.
And now this.
So whenever it rains and all my fellow Midlanders are dancing in the streets (figuratively; they’re not the sort of people who are in the habit of actually taking to the streets for much of anything except an appearance by George W. or the annual Mex-Tex Festival) with joy, I’m wandering through the house, watchful, checking (of course), wondering what’s going to leak next. And grumbling mightily.
Fucking rain.
I’m sitting here, trying to get ready to work, with a steady drip, drip, drip not four feet from my chair. I guess I should be thrilled the leak wasn’t over the computer. Guess that would have given me something REALLY  irritating to bitch about, huh?
But I grin to myself. I know they’ll fix the roof, and in timely fashion. How do I know this? Because when I wrote the Big Ass check the other day to pay for all this, I very cleverly held back $3000 for just such an eventuality. Oh, sure:  I’m still waiting on the depreciation from the insurance company. So technically I wasn’t supposed to pay the whole thing yet. But I could have. Somewhere in the back of my mind, though, I was thinking, Hmmmmm. Maybe not. Let’s wait. They haven’t installed the clear glass in the windows,  and we hadn’t had a really good rain. Let’s do it this way and just give things a little time.
Well, my little chickadees, I see it’s now after 8 am. Time to make a phone call. . . .