The rain arrived yesterday. If it had come by itself, I wouldn't have minded its company. Unfortunately, it came with a friend -- a blustery, seventy-mile-per-hour kind of friend.

Alone, rain isn't all that bad, once you get to know it. It can be comforting at times. But when it gets together with wind, it has tendency to act out, as if it's trying to prove it can be tough, too. It's as though rain is telling wind, "Oh, you blew over the man with the briefcase and nearly ripped the trench coat from his body, but that's nothing compared to the drenching I'm about to give him. He won't be dry for days."

When wind and rain get together, life becomes interesting (and drippy).

I'm not a fan of this wind. It's the type of wind that brings down trees and power lines and knocks out traffic signals. If the electricity doesn't fail today, I'll be surprised. Bookies in Las Vegas have probably already calculated the odds of an outage. My bet is on 3:55 PM.

It's the type of wind that wrecks umbrellas. In the sixty feet separating the train station from the bus stop, I saw two women fall victim to the gusts; their umbrellas shredded the moment they opened them. One attempted to throw hers away, but the garbage can was already filled with the tattered metal corpses of the weather's earlier victims.

It's the type of wind that blows so powerfully that the rain comes at you from every direction. Walking to work, I encountered an uppour and now my socks and shins are soaked.

Today is the kind of day that makes me grateful for mass transit, but worried about crossing the street. It's the kind of day that makes me wary of walking beneath construction cranes and heavy tree limbs. Today is the perfect stay-at-home-with-a-good-book-and-avoid-the-madness kind of day (and so will tomorrow and Sunday, according to the news).

I probably shouldn't complain about the wind and rain. We don't experience bad weather all that often here. Then again, one of the joys of bad weather is complaining. So, in a sense, I'm just making the most of a rare opportunity.

Wind, wind, go away,
But not you rain, you're okay.