Not many of you may know this about me, but I have made it my own personal mission to keep the glass entrances to Denver Seminary’s main buildings free of dirt, raindrops and fingerprints. Okay, actually I work in the maintenance department and they pay me nine bucks an hour to squeegee all of the entryways…
So the other day I’m walking from one building to the next, crankin’ U2 on the iPod and I start hearing this hissing noise…at first I thought something was going screwy with my earbuds, but that was not the case. The seminary’s new campus is built on an old farming property that butts up against the South Platte River, and the are quite a few snakes around the place. We saw a couple of garden snakes a few days before, but they didn’t hiss this loud. All I could think of was that there was a venomous Western Rattler around these parts, and I was about to step on it.
So I’m watching my step and looking for the snake, when out of the corner of my eye I saw something flash. I turned around and there was the local wildlife hissing at me…a daddy Candian Goose protecting his new family.
I laughed out loud until the dumb thing started flapping his wings at me and took a few hard steps. I prepared for battle by grabbing my window sponge and turning to face him. I think he could tell by the look in my eyes that I meant business and he slowly backed away. I still look over my shoulder when I’m walking that route though.
That night Renee was working and Jonathan and I went for a walk on the path by the river. We were about a mile and a half from home when some dark clouds started rolling in. We pulled a 180 and headed back towards campus, but, sure enough, we were caught in the rain. I put the little hood up on the stroller to try to shield it from him, but he kept sticking his hands and head out the side to feel it. So we just enjoyed the brief rainstorm and continued on our walk.
We’ve had quite a bit of these quick afternoon/evening rainstorms lately, and it’s actually how Denver weather used to be. The clouds come over the mountains and have a brief dump and move on. The problem recently has been urban sprawl. As the metro area gets bigger and traffic gets worse, Denver pollution has been pretty bad. This has caused a lot of these afternoon storms to produce nothing but virga. In recent years though, Denver’s pollution has begun to be a little more under control (the dirty brown cloud is now just yellow). Hopefully this means a little more time enjoying getting caught in the rain (maybe Renee and I will have the pina coladas after Jonathan goes to bed…just don’t ask us what we’re doing at midnight.)