Rain Woes

Disclosure: This is not the umbrella to which I will be referring. I just included this as a verfication of London's wet conditions. P.S. Check out the picture's file name. P.P.S. My smile is so fake.

Since fleeing rainy London, I have decided that umbrellas are no longer necessary. I think the reason for this is, in part, because I'm bitter. I had the cutest umbrella in London - black and white polka dotted and ruffled, with a J-shaped handle. I learned, within my first two soakings, to carry my umbrella everywhere with me. It doesn't matter what weather.com said, or The London Paper, or even if there wasn't a cloud in the sky. If you went outside without your umbrella, God would punish you.

I broke that umbrella in Wimbledon. It wasn't even raining that hard, but I was on my way to the photo shoot and I thought to myself, maybe I should be civilized. Maybe I should keep my hair from turning into a natty frizzball. Maybe I should stop the laziness and pull my umbrella out of my oversized purse. So I did, and promptly 5 seconds later, a gust of wind came and turned my umbrella inside out. That's not at all a new phenomenon, and it had happened roughly 11 times in the past, almost all of those on a pier in Ireland. But this time the inside outness was accompanied by a snap. My umbrella was gone.

I really miss it. Like I said, it was super cute. I actually found its identical twin at an H&M in St. Louis, but I just couldn't buy it. I paid 7.99 euros for that thing. I have not used an umbrella since my favorite one died in the freak accident.

It hadn't really been a problem, up to this week. The weather forecast said five days of rain. I scoffed. The weather forecaster is never right. Until now. It really has rained every day this week. This morning was the worst. It was POURING. I had left my sweater jacket in the car, right on my passenger seat, right under my partially cracked-open windows. It smelled like mildew.

I drive to school. One of my windshield wipers has a long string of black rubber hanging off it. When I'm stopped at a light, I'll let my eyes follow the rubber swishing back and forth - it makes me a little dizzy. The string of rubber is my fault, too, and it's from the time we had 2 feet of snow, all on top of my car. And I was cold, and lazy, so instead of shoveling off the snow with the scraper I had in my back seat, I opened my door, sat down, cranked up the heat and turned on the windshield wipers to do the dirty work for me. The wipers were not pleased.

I almost decided not to go to school today, but then I was like - what am I, a character from the Wizard of Oz? I'm not going to melt. Well, except for my make-up. I forgot that part. When I finally got to class, with raindrops dripping from my hair, forehead and eyelids, I took one long swipe across my face so that I didn't look like I had just stepped out of the shower. I took off a lot of the water, but I also took off a lot of mascara. And by take off, I mean that I put it somewhere else - like on my face.

I think I might invest in another umbrella after all.