Tut-tut, It Looks Like Rain

"So, what's the weather like in American Samoa?" is an oft spoke query.
To which I almost always reply, "82 degrees. Everyday."
Which isn't the whole story, really. Because sometimes it's really humid.
And sometimes there's a lot of wind. Sometimes the sun is out and the skies are clear. And often, very often, it rains. It's always still 82 degrees (sometimes a bit hotter in the concrete jungle of Tafuna-nothing like miles of asphalt without greenery at the equater to knock the thermostat up a couple of notches).

We have a variety of rain types. Just a little. A lot, but passing through. None in the morning, a lot at dusk. A bunch on the mountain, nothing at the beach. Torrents on the Westside, sunny on the Eastside. And then there are the hurricane level rains that batter our tin roof and make us put the movie on pause and hope it lets up enough so we can watch the end. The rain is always warm which is nice. There maybe days when it rains buckets all day long, but the doors and windows remain open. Not like the months in the PNW where you huddle inside, slowly moldering, keeping Starbucks in the black, wondering if this is the winter that you will be crawling to the doctor's office groveling for an RX of little blue pills of happiness for your Seasonal Affective Disorder, and then when the sun finally peeks out in say mid July, you shriek in terror at the fireball in the sky, "What IS that THING?!"

So, we've been having a weebit of weather of late and I thought I'd share as I don't have much to talk about but the weather.




And this is what can happen when your retaining wall isn't really retaining but is just a bunch of concrete block piled up on a mass of boulders:

Before:



After: