It has been raining non-stop today. I was going to go for a bike ride if it wasn’t raining… and then my back-up plan was to go for a run if it wasn’t raining that much… But, no such luck, so I just settled with going for a walk instead.
There’s a creek near my place that runs through a few parks and floods them whenever it rains enough, so I thought I’d wander over that way and check out the flooding. To be honest, I hadn’t expected it to be quite as flooded as it was, so I didn’t bring anything to take photos with (i.e. my phone), which is kind of a shame because my closest park was probably as flooded as I’d ever seen it.
I’m not too good at estimating distances, but I guess the water had gone 30+ metres from its banks, completely submerging the footpath that runs kind of parallel to it. I vaguely recall one time a few years back when I was coming home from uni/work and I’d just gotten off the bus and was walking down the hill to this footpath… only to realise that it was several centimetres under water.
Well, you’d think that this miserable weather would keep everyone indoors, holed up in front of their various technological devices, but, no, there were plenty of people out and about. I think most of them were kind of like me in the sense that they wanted to check out the flooding and/or they wanted to go for a walk. (Some of these people, however, didn’t have rain coats or umbrellas, even though it definitely would have been raining when they left their homes. It is something that totally perplexes me. Do these people just not own umbrellas? Do they want to get drenched in rain?)
There were quite a few people who just drove to the park and sat in the dryness of their cars to observe the rushing waters of the creek. (It might seem silly for them to be scared of a little rain, but at least they make more sense than the umbrella-less people.) And there were also quite a few people out walking their dogs. That’s good dedication.
I also saw many worms washed up on footpaths. Being considerate even of worms, I thought I’d try to move them off the footpath and onto some dirt so that they didn’t get stepped on or washed away and drowned (not sure if worms can actually drown, though…) or plucked away by a bird or left to bake and be eaten by ants once the sun came out (assuming the sun actually does return sometime in the near future).
Alas, the worms were not very receptive of my efforts. Most of them have (surprisingly) big reactions to even being touched and spasm away and try to escape. I never knew worms were so defensive(?), but I suppose even a worm knows when it needs to fight for survival (although technically I was trying to help it).
So I quickly gave up on rescuing the worms in the park, but there were plenty of worms around my back yard that were slightly more receptive to being air-lifted to safer ground (i.e. into pot plants). I have quite possibly saved about five lives this afternoon.
pistachio conspiracy #63 