rain rain

that's the house on the corner of palosapis, and its reflection in the floodwaters...

its been raining like i've never remembered it these past few weeks. and the weatherpeople were on the cusp of declaring a drought. but that was before a couple of supertyphoons skirted the "philippine area of responsibility" typhoon tracking zone.

based on the tracks of the storms i've seen (two, so far), the storms coalesced, then began their westward journeys, and then bounced somehow, ending up in a more northward track heading to taiwan and/or japan's southernmost tip.

this, in some senses, is a good thing, seeing as the southern part of luzon has yet to recover from one of the storms of late last year - and these howlers are even more powerful than last typhoon seasons.

skirting or no, they seemed to have enough power to "intensify" a periodic weather phenomenon called the southwest monsoon which is active this time of year.

end result, rain. lots of it.

on a positive note, the dams that provide hydroelectric power to the luzon grid are now mostly over their critical levels, one dam in fact posting a water level rise of 14 meters over these past two weeks of monsoon rain.

...heck of a lot of rain, that.

amazing weather, truly. global warming? hard to ignore the signs.

...such as a flooded street (the incessant downpours are also hard to miss).

atmospheric astronomica

this is about something called the annual perseid meteor shower.

it was scheduled (well, as schedule-friendly as these things can be) to peak the night of august 12-13, although supposedly, it could also be seen early morning on the 12th.

the mechanics are, on the surface, simple enough. the earth, in its yearly sojourn around the sun, runs into the dust left behind by periodic comet temple-tuttle.

now, imagine that. the earth in its relative hugeness, running into a trail left behind by a dirty snowball a few meters wide, and this has been happening for years beyond count (well, years before someone noticed that the shower of seemed to originate in the constellation perseus -- hence perseid meteors).

not sure about the orbital mechanics preventing the earth from running into the comet temple-tuttle itself, but that may be fodder for another post, somewhere if ever down the line...

anyway, set the alarm for 3am sunday, take a hell of a long time to get up, decide to push through with the plan (having earlier informed others by text of the probabilities of the show come 4am). drag long-suffering makati housemate along, and drive to the sucat interchange and cross to the eastern service road, parking by a road next to the commercial outpost i refer to by the presence of a figaro's on its topmost deck.

the eastern sky is dark and cloudfree, and i can't make out where to look for the constellation even with my handy-dandy sky chart. also, the place gives me the creeps, as the road down to an unknown village is unlit except by reflected floodlight from the commercial establishment's parking lot.

failure of nerve, and decide to drive on to the office where, by the light of the other buildings finally discover a means to identify the constellation of choice.

sum total, see no meteors; though glenn did see a satellite of some sort, and this area being where it is as part of the airport's holding pattern, several airplanes going to a fro.

get back home as the sun rises, and check the web. yahoo informs that the main peak should be 9-sunrise sunday night.

now, if it's a good enough shower, it should be visible even in light-polluted makati...

...i recall when living in mandaluyong that there was the beginning of an excellent meteor shower (though don't recall the month) with an intriguing effect: almost as soon as the shower began in earnest, all of a sudden, the sky clouded over.

sunday night, the sky was completely cloudy -- i went outside periodically to check.

there was a strange effect, though. don't know for sure if the meteors had anything to do with it, but even in the absence of thunderstorms in the vicinity, cable reception got scrambled several times.

i do know that one way to track (and count) meteor activity, is to listen to the radio emissions they make as they get pulverized by the friction of their passage in the lower atmosphere. perhaps that emission during a storm is enough to scramble the digital signals from the cable company link satellites or something...

anyway, so much for that.

there's supposed to be another shower sometime in september -- have to look that up, and we'll see how that works out.

3:30am, saturday and sometime thereafter

...the doorbell goes off. well, it's a buzzer, actually. and it's situated next to the light for the "backyard" area, and therefore directly under my window.

jump off my sofa/bed; lights, get a shirt on, fumble for keys. make it to the door, but none of the keys seem to work in the deadbolt. geez. upstairs again, get my car keys (which for sure has the front door key too), fumble that into the deadbolt and get out.

all the while, the buzzer stays on.

in this haze, i'm wondering what the hell this could be all about. heck, green car of unit "d" isn't even in, and i've parked on the street so that i don't have to be woken to let the green car park next to their unit.

make it to the gate...

...there's someone there, and he's managed to open the pedestrian gate. he grabs (rather unsteadily), a styro cup of take-out coffee from the ground and then does a double-take as he sees me standing there looking at him.

then he makes a sign with his free hand, index and middle finger up, but crossed one behind the other? as he makes his unsteady way past me, there's a whiff of a smell i associate with someone having drunk quite a bit of alcoholic beverages...

he goes to the door of unit "b," gets keys from somewhere on his person, and lets himself in.

...what the heck was the doorbell all about, then?

anyway, just to be sure, go into the street to check on the car.

get back into the apartment, have difficulty going to sleep.

...

fast forward to today. from makati, headed first to pilar to get a change of pants (there was a hole in a, shall we say, strategic, location on the pair i'd had on -- needed to exchange it for one that was less, um, hole-y). :-)

get into apartment, and pump motor goes on. eh? knock on doors, no sign of occupancy. got changed, and began to check the cr's out, to see if there's anything amiss with the plumbing. downstairs cr, check. upstairs, check. master bedroom cr -- the faucet in the sink is running; a minor stream, but more than a trickle. hmm. wonder how long it's been left this way. likely whole weekend. oh well.

leave apartment, locking up, just in time to see a strangely familiar figure leave unit "b". hmm.

by the time i get the car out to mercury, he's midway down the street and a tricycle has just ignored his hail.

stop the car and wait. as he passes, i ask if he's on his way out and he needs a lift.

thinking back, this must have been so strange; but we get past the oddness of it when i ask if he's from our street, and he mistakes me for the guy from unit "d", but i say i'm from unit "c" and off we go.

turns out that the 3:30am buzzer was his brother, louie (and he was plastered). this guy's name is rex, and they're all siblings in unit "b," which is really his sister's, but their mother doesn't want her all alone out here, hence the brotherly companionship.

rex does apologize for the early saturday rousing, and we're at the pilar exit to alabang zapote, and off he goes to wherever he works (which is in pasig, didn't ask specifically where).

and thus begins another day at work.