Is it Summer Yet?

I guess we can forget that and just reminisce about the three, or was it four, really hot summer days we had. (What that last week or week before?)

People who have just settled into Puget Sound country will soon begin to listen to the old timers around here: If you don't like the weather just wait 15 minutes. Or a day or two. Or a few weeks. It will change! My Aunt Emma used to say, "Rain at seven, sun by eleven". Most days she was spot on.

I don't mind the rain. When I really enjoyed it was when we used to take out our big old Monk boat on rainy days and curl up on the bunk with a good book or sit at the dinette table in the cabin and play dominoes. The pleasant sound of rain pattering away on the roof didn't bother us: Until it started coming inside. We would be sound asleep in the big bunk and water started running down the neck of the one sleeping on the inside, close to the leaky windows. I stored lots of plastic buckets for such occasions. By the time I located the buckets and then where it was dripping in, we were wide awake and ready for that first cup of coffee. Heck, it was already 4 a.m.

Smart remarks before we drank a couple of sips of the aforementioned coffee, like, "Told you we should have taken care of the dry rot last summer when it was nice and dry" led to smarter retorts such as "You were the one who had to go on vacation when the boss said you had to and it left no time for working on the boat"!

Reminded me of a story about an old school friend, Joe Mentor, who was infamous for taking short cuts with his own properties. He leased a property to a hardware store whose owner complained that the roof was leaking. Joe dutifully went over to the store and grabbed some buckets from the shelves and placed them under the leaks.

Never heard whether or not the roof got fixed before the owner ran out of new buckets.