Bad Weather, Bad Omen, Bad Attitude

This weather is KILLING me.

Last night I checked my handy dandy weather app to see what the weather was going to be like for Connor's game the following day.  This is what I saw...

hmmmmmmm.  That can't be good.   

A severe weather warning.

Don't you love reading the words "below normal", "snow levels", and "freezing temperatures" in LATE MAY?  If I had a therapist, I would have added him to my speed dial.

I snapped.  I had reached my foul weather limit.  If there was an app that could have warned the surrounding areas of my impending bad attitude, it would have immediately issued a severe ATTITUDE warning to anyone who had the misfortune to cross my path.  This would have been its prediction:

"Irritated grouchy-ness will continue through the week.  Cussing and muttering are expected.  Isolated tantrums and widespread gloom are possible until weather improves."

Needless to say I went to bed very grouchy.  And when I woke up this morning, I spent a good part of the day checking and then re-checking the forecast as if the weather people would make a sudden and less gloomy prediction from the one posted ten minutes before.

But  the sad reality was RAIN, RAIN, and more RAIN...

When I arrived for the game the sky looked like this...

How nice.  The gray complimented my dreary overcast eyes and furrowed brows.

This photo was taken during the best weather of the evening.  The worst was yet to come, and naturally, we were about to survive the impending doom while we were visiting the town of Phoenix/Talent-which isn't quite as posh as sitting under the slightly sheltered bleachers back in Ashland. 

Do you notice a massive lack of fans in the above photo?  The frigid winds had long blown most of the timid parents away to the shelter of their cars.  Just the die-hards left.  But even I was questioning my sanity.  And see my friend to the right?  That's Nicolle.  She appears to be wearing a Snuggie but it's actually what I call a Snuggie on steroids.  Water-proof on the outside, soft and fuzzy on the inside.  It's made for Grizzly football fans.  But I think Nicolle has used it way more for the spring baseball than she does for football season.

Then suddenly things took a bizarre turn for the worse.  When we headed into the top of the 6th inning, I looked up at the scoreboard and saw this:

It seems the Heavens come pre-wired with an emergency sprinkler system set to douse and put out any spark of demonic omens.  As the center lights for the inning changed from the 5th to the 6th, the skies opened and let out a torrential downpour.

The deluge was massive.  So massive that I broke from my usual disdain for that awkward contraption the umbrella.   Most Oregonians find the umbrella more of a bother than a protective haven.  We prefer to rush through the rain unencumbered.  But sitting in and soaking up the rain while sitting on metal bleachers is another matter altogether.

The rain poured so hard my large umbrella could have used a gutter on its circumference and a massive downspout to siphon the rain away.  Instead, every body part unfortunate enough to be under the trailing edges of the umbrella got a thorough soaking.  We tried to get someone to take a photo of our sad little scene but no one was brave enough to stand in the rain long enough to take one.

So there Nicole and I sat; top of the 6th, wind whipped, soaked by rain, left to contemplate the meaning of the unpleasant omen belching from the scoreboard.

Something drastic had to be done.  And so we did it.

Yes, sadly, we began to cheer for the opposing team.  If the score remained tied it would mean playing another inning-which in our desperate and depressed state, could not, should not, happen.  Not to mention, if they called the game due to rain we'd have all went home knowing we'd left the score at the unmentionable.  And any Ashlander knows that would be very bad Karma.

The pitcher on the opposing team was a bit surprised as we began to cheer him on by name.  Our sons looked at us in shock and disbelief.  Their own mothers rooting on the enemy.  But we were drenched, tired, wind whipped mothers and I'd like to think that the...

...scoreboard beguiled us.

And it worked.  We lost!  But did we really?

No.  It meant I got to go home!

Top of the 8th, I'm soaking my weather woes in the tub.  Sounds like a small victory to me.

Devious Drizzle Dodgers

A fall mystery presented itself.  The kids were coming home from school, fresh off the bus, with little or no signs of being wet from the rain...and not just any rain, Oregon rain.  It took me a few days of consecutive afternoon showers to notice they were arriving home bone dry.  I was originally trying to gauge how sorry to feel for my poor helpless kids, whom I was forcing to fend for themselves under the harsh aquatic assaults of mother nature each afternoon as they dashed the length of our driveway to the warm shelter of home.

They were so dry in fact, that I wondered if they'd smuggled umbrellas with them.  Umbrellas are the sort of sissy contraptions true Oregonians shun.  We leave them to the folks in California or back on the East Coast...and other places around the globe where apparently it's not fashionable to look like a drowned dog. (though I've seen a rash of these contraptions infecting southern Oregon as more people move here from the aforementioned fashion-conscious areas.)  The thought of my children using an umbrella, well, this was an alarming activity that would have to be purged as a bad habit, should it be true.

Fearing the worst, I asked them one day, just how they were threading the gauntlet of droplets and getting home so unscathed...turned out, it was not umbrellas after all.  Whew!  Though the truth may actually be worse.  No surprise, it's that my kids are major scheme-ers.

They explained to me that they are the last kids to be dropped off in the afternoon, and after they get dropped off, the bus driver waves them across the road and continues on down the highway until he reaches an old weigh station for trucks where he can turn the bus around and head back into town.  Seeing opportunity, Connor and Chloe convinced the driver to save himself some time and just head up our driveway and see if the giant bus could turn around on our circle.  He fell for it!!  And now, they get dropped off right at the front walkway every stinkin' day.

I waited to confirm their story and sat out on the porch the following day and waited.  Sure enough, these dang lazy kids are getting dropped off right in front of the house!  Bunch of country kids livin' it up like they're city folk!  Devious Devils.  Mystery solved.