And The Tale Gets Taller...

We sure do have some powerful weather here in New England, and that's no lie. Today was the most humid day we've had in a while around these parts, and it tends to get real humid around here. When I went out to the parking lot this morning to load up my mail truck the air was so thick it took almost a full minute to pull in each breath. All the carriers were out there open-mouthed, gasping like goldfish. I watched as one of the clerks inside the building rolled up one of the bay doors on the loading dock and called out to one of the carriers that he had forgotten a package. Well, the fool clerk, being inside in the air-conditioned building, didn't know how thick the air was out in the parking lot, and he tried to toss that package out to the carrier. We all watched as the package sailed out of the processed air inside and into the humidity outside, and came to rest about eight feet off the ground sitting on a packed pile of that thick air.
Well, we weren't sure just how to get that package down, what with it sitting there on nothing but air, other than waiting for the weather to break. The clerk went into the building, though,  and came back to the loading dock with a long pole. He reached that pole out and pushed that package down like a man trying to sink a basketball in a pool. Eventually he managed to shove the package down into the carrier's waiting hands and, since the show was over, we all hit the road.
I was walking along, delivering my route, and I had to lean forward at a 45 degree angle just to make any headway through the atmosphere. I was struggling step after step, trying to breathe and wishing it would just rain and get it over with, when the sky opened up and water came dumping down.
It was raining hard. I mean hard. And raining hard around here may be a little different in this part of the country than it is wherever you're from. The water was falling so solidly that I heard a splash and when I looked to see what it was I found a bird that had just fallen out of the sky. It must not have been from around here, was probably just migrating through, and hadn't yet learned the knack of breathing where the rain wasn't. The poor thing had started to drown while flying through the air! Well, I got it under the shelter of someone's porch and held it up out of the knee deep river of runoff water while I gave it artificial respiration until it recovered.
By this time, some of my customers were coming out to get the mail from me in canoes and kayaks, and one old guy had a rowboat, and I gave the little bird to one him to take care of as I slogged on through the flood. I was making progress in my route slow but sure. Then, just as I was figuring that the rest of my day would be like this, the rain stopped. The clouds parted and the sun came out like God himself had flipped a light switch.
Well that sun came down so strong and hard the water from the rain runoff (which was waist deep by then) started to boil. Great clouds of steam rose up, and I took refuge on another handy porch in order to avoid cooking my legs, not to mention my 'unmentionables'.  It was while I was on that porch waiting for all that water to boil off that another customer came out to get her mail. She's an older lady who came here  from somewhere's else when she retired, and it's taking her a while to get used to our weather. She came out to get that mail from inside the house where she had been keeping dry. So dry, in fact, that that new and powerful sunlight set her shirt on fire in about a half a second. She started flailing her arms and hollerin' away, but I just hustled her inside and put her out with the vegetable sprayer in the kitchen sink.
Well, it alternated the pouring rain with the burning sun for the rest of the day and I managed to keep wet enough to avoid bursting into flames myself while I finished my route. When I got back to the Post Office, my boss wanted to know what had taken me so long. I told him it was the weather.
"Well," he says, "I was in a meeting all day in a room with no windows. What kind of weather did we have?"
"This is New England," I answered. "It almost goes without saying that you name it, we had it!"

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Sorry. I read a book recently where one of the characters tells a lot of Tall Tales. It kind of stuck in my head.
Basically, when it wasn't pouring rain today it was hot as hell.

Talk to you later!