Rain

The last couple of nights, it has rained all night long. Last night, the rain was so loud as to by and large drown out the noise from the constant traffic on Ortigas Ave. Extension—no mean feat. Earlier this morning, I was sitting in my apartment (the internet connection there is having problems or else I would post from there) and the wind was amazing in its severity. I actually felt something I never thought I would feel: cold! So I rushed through and closed all the windows. But then I got an amazing show with the trees outside my front window being billeted about by the wind. This must be what a monsoon is like, I would suspect. I’ll find out sometime between when I am writing this and when I actually post it if that suspicion is correct. There are a lot of strange noises: pieces of the house being bandied about, even. This is almost scary. I even had to go get a towel out of the laundry bin and stuff it under the front door to prevent encroachment from the water outside. I am going to switch to battery power on the computer to make sure. I don’t want an unexpected power surge to destroy the computer, because then I’d really be in a world of hurt. Now as I write the rain and wind have calmed down a bit and I can again hear the sounds of the traffic. Those sounds, which over the first few days here were somewhat of an irritant, now have become a source of comfort as I see first-hand, for the first time, the fury of the weather here during the rainy season. I pray particularly for the squatters and others who do not have nearly the same stability in their living quarters that I do.

Update: I found out in talking to others that "monsoon" and "typhoon" are basically synonymous. I had thought there was a distinction between those two things, but now we just got an email about Typhoon Frank/FengShen. Interesting.