Rainey Blogs on Some Days

Like most people, I have a morning routine. If any of this routine is interrupted, my day is ruined. Here’s the routine: I get up when I get up. I do not use an alarm. If I go to bed early, I get up early. If I go to bed late, I get up a little later. This is very simple. If I’m driving to the Midwest and have to leave at 3 a.m., I use an alarm. Otherwise, I get up when I get up. The next thing I do in the morning is go downstairs and start the coffee. When I make the coffee, I hate when I find the grinds from the day before in the metal filter . This is very disturbing to me and makes me angry, but my anger lasts only a moment. After I dump the grinds in the garbage and rinse out the filter, I am back on track. I can put the new coffee grinds in the filter, fill up the water to the 9-cup line for the three of us drinking coffee, turn on the coffee pot and away we go. By the way, I have never had a coffee pot with a timer that I can set to start up at a certain time so the coffee is...

Something I miss by living in New Jersey is the opportunity to watch a storm blow through. Right now as I write this on Labor Day weekend, I am in Leesburg, Florida (near Orlando), sitting beside a screened in patio and pool at my father-in-law’s house. I am protected from the rain by an overhang. The rear of the house overlooks a cow pasture. Hues of dark and light gray clouds bulging with water are moving across the sky just above the pasture. The crackle of lightning and the subsequent thunder in the distance remind me once again about nature’s power as the wind hisses through the trees and drops of rain, at times heavy and at times light, make disappearing circles in the pool. There is a raw beauty I love in a storm. I am mostly unaware that I do not often get to watch storms. When I am in Florida, a rain or storm blows through nearly every afternoon, sometimes just taunting us with a threatening sky that does not deliver any rain, and at other times a downpour descends from the ...