Extra Hoo.

I don't know what Mayflowers bring, but we're getting our April showers early, like everything else. This was not in the forecast when I worried about the ten-day last week. Maybe Tuesday's big storm was enough to wrinkle our weather pattern. And, locals, no, I haven't gone crazy. It's crisp and cool and so sunny that the first thing I did this morning was just open the door and stand in it, listening to the jays scream at each other, to the wrens, to the towhees, and to what my Peterson's Guide suggests was a Great Horned Owl, with its "resonant hooting of 3-8 hoots. Male usually 4 or 5, in this rhythm: hoo, hoo-oo, hoo, hoo." Sometimes he added an extra hoo.

But back to our top story, which is this:

That's the super-cool QPF from the Hydrometeorological Prediction Center, the link to which is over and down on the right in the long bar of weird weather shit I play with all the time. QPF: Quantitative Precipitation Forecasts. The short of all this? (a) The QPF is very, very cool. Like at least as cool as the deck of cards my brothers and I had when we were little that had pictures of very super-cool sportscars on them—Ferarris, Bugattis, Lamborghinis. From time to time we'd go through them all, eliminating cars until we were down to our top ten coolest, or top five. Then we'd fight about which one was the super-coolest. I was eleven or twelve. They would have been eight. This was desperately important business. (b) They—the QPFers—want to give us an inch and a half of rain. Maybe even a little more.

And the NOAA dudes—how did I miss out on being part of this? How is it I do what I do and not instead go to work at the National Weather Service? I was a member of the AV club in high school, for chrissakes. Doug Barbin and I were the AV club, in fact, the chief benefit of which was that I got to attach the tiny expensive microphones to the girls in the talent show, which placed me in very close proximity to those girls, and to those girls' bodies, which ruled—the NOAA dudes want it to set in tomorrow as a steady all-day rain, one of those low-skied spring rains, and then they want to give us very late-night or early-morning thunderstorms. Here is how good this is: It is like I have won the argument, and the Lamborghini Countach LP500 is the coolest car ever. It is like Kerri Gates, captain of the cheerleading team but also somehow unapologetically in orchestra, is dressed up like a bee and getting ready to play Flight of the Bumblebee on her violin and someone is going to have to help her with the microphone situation.

Once, Kerri Gates and I spent an entire class period in the band office making those folded cut-out paper snowflakes together. I do not remember how or why this happened. I remember only that it did happen. My senior year of high school. I had a girlfriend. It wasn't anything like that. It was just that there I was, eighteen years old, sitting in a very small room with the captain of the cheerleading team, upon whom I'd had a crush since I'd been aware of my own skin, making paper snowflakes. How is it that these things matter to us even after we've spent years and years learning that, in fact, they do not much matter?

Tomorrow is a good day for a rain hat. A heavy shirt. The boots you don't mind getting wet. The QPF is in, and the news is good. I am the biggest fool who ever lived.