Rain rain go away

The sun has just gone behind clouds again, but a few minutes ago I was enjoying our first sunshine in about 3 days. Even though we are currently in the middle of the rainy season, the name is a bit misleading. Unlike the solid days of rain you might picture (as I did before I spent a rainy season here), the rainy season around here is just the time of year when nearly all the annual rainfall happens. That rain mostly falls in afternoon showers or overnight, so most of the days are free of rain and bright and sunny. The last time I saw an extended period of rain like this, the remains of a hurricane were passing over Mexico. I suspected that might be the case this time as well, but I didn’t have any way to watch the news to see for sure. There is a TV in one of the bedrooms here at the house, but it didn’t have an antenna. I knew I’d seen one somewhere when I was snooping around the house when I first moved in, and I finally located it yesterday. It was in the fireplace in the lab, of course! So today I caught the news and saw them covering the destruction caused by a hurricane that passed over the country. They were showing all sorts of towns that were completely flooded, so our couple of days of having the streets here turn into rivers doesn’t seem so bad. I was used to that in New Orleans anyway. Hopefully the steady rains are over now. The rainy season will be winding down over the next few weeks, and it should be pretty much over by early October. Then the long dry season begins and lasts until May or June. The very lush landscape that I see now will slowly return to desert-like conditions over the winter and through the spring.
This week I decided to share more photos of Oconahua. One is of the view from the front of my house. It looks over the yard of my across-the-street neighbors and shows a bit of the rugged volcanic mountains just beyond the town. Yes, that’s my laundry drying on the fence—I have to wash my clothes in the kitchen sink and dry them on the fence. The other photo is of the front of my house. The house works well for our purposes and could be a really nice place if someone decided to finish it. I’m not sure what the fate is of the house. It has been purchased by the state and sits on top of the archaeological ruins here. Perhaps it and the others nearby will someday be razed to allow for the reclamation and study of the site.