God and His Toro Irrigation System

In extreme temperatures golf course managers syringe their greens by spraying a little bit of water on the green, then using the evaporation of the water off the grass on the green to cool it down. I'm pretty sure God runs the weather here in Hong Kong much the same way. He's how I think it works:

During the summer months God likes to take it a bit easy. So instead of being out in the hot sun he stays in and watches the newest episode of "Guiding Light" or catches up on re-runs of "Touched by an Angel." As he gets up to refill his glass of sweet tea He sees Hong Kong is getting a bit hot. He picks up his Toro irrigation controller (seriously, would God use anything but Toro?) and turns on the sprinklers over Hong Kong for a few minutes in the afternoon to cool it down. Meanwhile, I'm going about my business mowing and all of the sudden it starts raining, and pouring. I get completely soaked before I can put on my rain gear. Then the sun comes back out, heats everything up nice and hot and you can see steam coming off the black asphalt, and on some days, coming off the greens.

The weather here is so unpredicatable. I have found out that if I want it to stop raining, all I have to do is put on my rain gear and it decides to stop. If I want it to continue to rain, I just decide against the rain gear. Sometimes it can't decide if it should rain or not so it will do something inbetween where there is water hanging in the air, but not exactly falling. Sometimes it is so humid out, the air seems to drip with water, much like God's glass of sweet tea probably drips water off the outside. Sometimes it rains hard, so hard you can't see 30 feet away from you and sometimes it won't rain for days on end.

The local weather service does a great job of giving the weather outlook. Ninety percent of the time the outlook just says "Hot with a chance of a few showers" If I had to sum up the weather that I have experienced here so far, I would put it in four categories: 1) Hot, 2) Very hot, 3)Rainy 4) Can't exactly decide to rain or not.

I really like the hot humid environment, but I have mixed feelings about the random rain showers that don't last more than 2 minutes, but are enough to soak you. I just read an article this morning about how temperatures in my home state of Iowa had overnight temps of less than 60 degrees. It was 81 degrees at 4:00am today!

I have really grown to like this heat and even the humidity and I know going back to Iowa in November is going to be a shock!