finally, some good rain

Watering is boring. So I like it to rain an inch or two every week, even if it makes fitting in mowing more difficult. The last 24 hours we've had steady rain, more than 2 inches now. Flooded areas are cursing. I'm okay.

Last year I posted one of these when there was an intense storm, about as intense as you want to live with. This year's looks the same, but it was a pleasant thunderstorm, actually. No big gusts, lightning and thunder and very dark skies, but I kept electricity and didn't hear tornado sirens, so I'm just grateful for the rain.

(Also, 24 hours of rain keeps the noisy trashy neighbors indoors. I'd pray for a 40-day Deluge for that to happen.)

I went out between waves of storms this morning and tied up tomatoes better and pinched out a few suckers--the easy ones. I can tell I'm never going to be perfect about getting rid of the suckers, but last year it didn't hurt tomato production, so I'm hoping it doesn't this year either!

Property tax bill came (ouch) and house insurance bill. I've been here a year, so that makes sense, but it doesn't make me happy. I don't know how long I'll last as a homeowner here. I don't like the mentality or many of the people here, and the house feels like a drain money keeps swirling down, despite my best efforts. For the property tax plus insurance, I could have paid for a year's worth of RV park rent and electricity--and had free water, trash, and internet to boot! So I may just end up living in an RV in Arizona again next year or the year after. I reconnected with relatives and met some I'd never known (the ones in their teens and twenties). I was surprised how I now liked some of the relatives I didn't used to particularly like and felt so-so on some I once liked. (Some of that is being inured to grumpy old people since being around a lot of them for 15 years and becoming one myself.) But I got away from here once, and in general, interesting people do escape beginnings like this, so to me, this feels a backward move. Also, it's just plain backwards here, in general. The funerals alone--geez, you'd think it was 1952 the way they do it here. They bury people, of all silly things, after pumping the bodies full of water-table-poisoning chemicals. Crazy stuff. And women worry too much about looks here and they even walk differently, like every step is an apology for existing. If a group of people go out, men only talk to men and women only to women. Silliness. It wasn't just moving to a place when I came here, it was moving back at least a generation in time in social attitudes. Not regretting trying this out...but it's not an unqualified success.

So, yeah...don't think I'm long for the Midwest. While I was just living life and not paying attention, I became a Westerner. A Western woman, in fact, independent and strong and successful, and not ashamed of or being willing to apologize for being an adult.

But before I think about putting the house on the market, I get tomatoes from fertile land in a place where it actually rains from out of the sky occasionally. (One terrible thing about much of the Western US is that it doesn't do that often enough.) I'm really looking forward to them.