Here, June showers bring July flowers

By the first week of July, all the rain cleared out. It literally felt like a great big spigot controlling flow to a great big sprinkler through a great big hosepipe was turned off. Except it didn't make the squeaking normal spigots always do. The point is, it went from blah one day to absolutely beautiful the next. After a month of rain, you could practically hear the flowers blossoming in the sunlight. My drive to Toyotama took me past wildflowers I've never seen before. (I don't know much about flowers, but I'm sure it'd be even more spectacular to an expert.) Once again, since I didn't have a camera, all I can do is fail to adequately describe them. There were several kinds with blossoms arranged in balls of 20-30. They came in shades of blue to purple. There were also awesome orange lilies. (See? Failure.) While a few houses have flower patches, the overwhelming majority of these were just growing wild along the road.

There was a brief period of comfortable weather as the rainy season officially blew out, but by the second week of the month everything was blanketed in heat. Highs which had a week before floated in the mid-70s jumped to the high 80s, with the same ridiculously high humidity from June. Basically, it turned into summer in most of the southern U.S. Of course, just as with the winter cold, I quickly realized what a difference insulation and climate control can make.

My schools' staffrooms began using the air conditioning, and while that gave welcome relief, it almost made teaching more miserable. I would last maybe five minutes in the classroom before being coated in sweat, and that's without my usual jumping around and walking from desk to desk. Again, just like during winter, my frustration was on the students' behalf. I get to change into shorts when I'm not teaching, drive to school in air conditioning if I want to, and I get to retreat to a 75-degree air-conditioned staffroom between each class. They have to endure the swelter all day long, and of course they still have club activities and P.E. to deal with.