Rain and More Rain - Must Be Hilo

I heard someone from Oahu say that yesterday at a Digital Media Workshop I took some students to.  I had a little giggle from that - there are even songs like, "Hilo's Such a Rainy Old Town" to describe our weather.  However, I live in an even rainier section of the island, and it has been raining hard enough to wake me up in the middle of the night.  If I hadn't already given up on the original sloping garden bed because my husband said he wanted to dig it out and make it level, I would have been forced to by the soil washing down hill.

I do have to say in my defense, that several years ago when we were arguing about where to put that garden bed, I was against that particular spot.

Feeding the animals is a sloppy mess.  My husband put some pallets out in the chicken run, because it was more like a mud river than a place for the hens to exercise and scratch.  The drainage powers of volcanic cinder have been sorely tested by the bucket of rain we've had over the last week.

I have to say, the rain made the movie projects we were making at the Digital Media Workshop challenging, too.  It was difficult to record our "nat sound" sequences when the rain was rushing and pounding like a river off of the roofs of the walkways at the school which was hosting the event.  We learned a lot and had a lot of fun, though.  My daughter, who used to go to my school, but is now at another school, took one of the spots of a no-show - I think she is excited to share what she learned with her teachers and friends, and she got to feel like one of the "big kids" with my high school aged team.

After our digital media adventures, eleven year old and I went to pick up her brother from Driver's Ed.  He came out of the class in his track uniform and yelled in the window of the car, "I just heard my event called; gotta go!"  Fortunately, the track meet and the Driver's Ed class were at the same school, so he just ran through the parking lot, down the steps to the track, and onto the field to warm up.  We thought, foolish us, that he had just the 800 to run, that he'd already run the 3000 earlier in the day (his dad dropped him off at 12 noon).  Nope, he had to run both the 3000 m and the 4 x 400 m races: back to back in the pouring rain.  When I mean pouring, it was raining so hard that I could barely see the far side of the track.  My daughter and I had one umbrella and rather inadequate jackets and were wearing rubber slippers (flip flops).  It was exciting, but freezing.

I was hoping that magically, all the animals would have been fed and the dinner made as we rolled in at 8 pm, but this was not the case.  I found that the jacket my husband gave me the other day to help keep the rain and mud off my clothes was marvelously warm and toasty for feeding in the cold rain.  And when I came in, I was excited to find that there were enough leftovers to feed everyone, so I didn't have to cook.  Nice ending to a long and exciting day.