Rain, Rain Go Away

Oh.My.God. Will it ever stop raining???!!!! It has been raining without a break for about 10 days now, and I'm not talking no Seattle-like rain. We are talking torrential downpours intermixed with light rains. Our pool has been overflowing for days. Yesterday the Embassy closed for the 2nd time in a week due to flooding. Oh, and did I mention it's closed today as well? And it's not even a freaking typhoon!! What happens when a real storm gets here???

I knew the Philippines had a tropical climate and that we would get some pretty serious rainstorms, just like we did in FL, but this is verging on ridiculous. The greyness and the being trapped indoors are starting to get to me (to all of us, really). And it's supposed to keep raining at least through the end of this week..if not longer! My driver says August is the worst month for rain, though, so maybe we'll start to see some reprieve in, oh, about 4 weeks, hahahahaha!* Then, of course, we'll enter the hot season, and I'll probably be whining about how it never rains ;)

Thank god some of the kids are back in school now because at least it gets them out of the house. Poor T&V are spending much of their vacation trapped in the house. I'd like to say they're being entertained by watching the Olympics, but the Olympics coverage in the Philippines, to put it mildly, sucks major ass. Maybe it's because the Philippines only sent like 3 athletes to the Games (all of them are out), so no one here gives a crap? I'm not really sure, but even though we purchased the $50 (USD!!) Olympics coverage package with three extra channels devoted to Olympic coverage, all I've seen are things like the preliminary trials for women's badminton and the team epee finals (China vs. Korea!). No gymnastics, no swimming. We did catch a little of the heptathlon (Husband thinks Jessica Ennis is pretty hot), but none of the final events. Plus, they do almost no replays here, so I have effectively missed most everything I love about the Olympics. Yesterday when I was home from work we caught the replay of: women's vault medal ceremony (they did not actually replay the sport itself, that would be silly, who wants to see the action when you can watch 20min of people kissing each others cheeks and getting flowers?) and 5min of men's vault competition before the switched in mid-sir to...water polo. Yes, water polo. Are there more fans of water polo than gymnastics in the Philippines, or do they just figure that no one is watching anyway and they might as well fuck with the 3 expat viewers who were dumb enough to actually shell out the $50 (USD!!!!***)? No Olympics, no Shark Week, no sunshine. It's shaped up to be kind of a crappy summer :( In the good news, climbing out of my self-pity party column, we have started to plan some trips for post-summer, better weather season. Husband and I are signed up for the Bangkok marathon in Nov** and we're planning another trip to Cambodia somewhere in the Feb timeframe. We've also got preliminary plans for family trips to Bohol and Palawan, and a joint-family trip to New Zealand with my little sis is in the works. So we just have to get through this next month!

*please ignore the maniacal laughing. 
**Okay, so the husband is signed up for the full marathon. I only agreed to the half and only because he signed me up without my knowledge and paid for the whole thing before I could say no. 
***Did I mention that already?