In the Early Morning Rain

I've been distracted by the rain this morning, but in a good way.  We've had a gentle, soft rain, so different than the tropical downpours we so often get.  I went for a morning walk, thinking that the rain was over, and it started to pitter patter down again.  I kept going because it was so pleasant.

I have the day off for Sukkot, so I could take a longer walk.  I went over to Holland Park, where there's a boardwalk over the water.  

Here and there, I had a glimpse of the full moon as it slipped to the west.  Here and there, the clouds shifted to show a little slip of sunrise.

I needed a long walk today.  I spent 5 hours--literally 5 hours--yesterday trying to get a student enrolled into her clinical rotation, and that's with working technology on the hospital end.  At one point, we had 2 personal laptops and 2 personal cell phones involved, because our campus still doesn't have computers or phones.  In a delightful surprise, the mi fi hotspot was able to keep up with our internet needs.

It took over an hour on the phone with the tech support people before we got the answer that we would need to create a new course rotation, that we couldn't simply extend the one that had ended Sunday, the way we would have if we had realized we needed to extend it before Sunday.  It took another hour on the phone to help the Program Chair set up her access, once we figured out that she didn't have the access we thought she did.

I was able to clone a previous rotation with just a click or two, but getting the student's documents where they needed to be was a whole different challenge.  They were the same documents we've used twice before, and I don't understand why it's such a onerous undertaking to import those.   

As I worked, I was able to listen to the student and the Program Chair talk about the wonders they had seen inside the blood vessels and hearts they had scanned.  At one point, the Program Chair murmured, "It's so beautiful, isn't it?"  And hearing the student's enthusiasm kept my spirits from sinking on more than one occasion.

As I walked this morning, I tried to let the rain rinse the tech frustrations away from me.  I thought about how the gentle, soft rains are getting rarer in this world of global warming.  I wondered if there will come a day when category 3 hurricanes will seem minor, as we see more and more category 4 and 5 storms smashing into our coasts.  I've been thinking about Hurricane Hugo, which was near the coast of South Carolina on this day back in 1989, which seemed so ferocious at the time, but which has been dwarfed by subsequent hurricanes.  Sigh.

Happily, this year, right now, no hurricanes threaten us, and I can spend my holiday catching up on some writing for my seminary classes.  Right now, I can watch the rain from my 6th floor balcony as it sweeps across the skyline to the south.  It's similar to watching rain across a mountain range, and yet it is so different.