A month ago, it was spring. It was hot and sunny and the cold and rain stopped. Then it came back. It’s raining right now, and it’s been raining for hours. Which would be fine except for having to bike home in the rain. This morning, the rain had stopped by the time I left for work, and I biked to the train station in an extremely light drizzle, and I hadn’t really thought about the afternoon, except to assume it would probably clear up by then. It never really did, though. It was a slight drizzle pretty much all day, up until the time I left for work. Which is when it started to pour cats and dogs.

Normally, I keep an umbrella and a plastic poncho in my backpack in case of rain. Not today. I can take the bus instead of walking or biking, but I lacked exact change. I stepped into Subway to get some food, and maybe some change, and by the time I stepped out again, the bus had come and gone, and I really didn’t want to wait half an hour for the next one. Besides, how much rain could there be?

I do not think I have ever been more wet than I was by the time I got home. It’s only a ten minute bike ride, but I do not think I could have been thrown into a swimming pool without becoming more wet. The jacket did a decent job of protecting my upper body, but the helmet does little for the hair and face, and the sheets of rain beating down on my glasses make it difficult to see. Sitting on a bicycle, the lower body (being exposed, horizontal, and unprotectd) bears the brunt of the downpour, and by the end of the trip, my legs and feet were pretty well soaked. The final experience, which I have never before had, was that somehow the rain got into my pants, and water started pooling up between my and the bicycle seat inside my clothes, similar to a wet suit, such that I was basically sitting in a pool of water as I biked. That was fun.

Tomorrow, I make sure to bring change for the bus.

Watching through the Star Trek: The Next Generation DVDs, I’ve been getting increasingly apprehensive, because I’ve known that I must be approaching a certain episode. This is an episode that I found incredibly scary when I first saw the show on its first-run airing; I was twelve at the time, and I had nightmares for days afterwards. Yesterday, when I saw the title of “Night Terrors”, I was worried that it might be the episode I remembered, and watched it with a certain amount of trepidation. It turned out not to be, and a bit relieved, tonight I watched the next episode, “Identify Crisis” with my guard down, and hiding behind that innocuous title was the episode I had been dreading. Actually, it turns out it wasn’t that scary this time around. Ironically, I found “Night Terrors” far more frightening.

I’ve noticed that the episodes have a tendency to come in groups; these are things you notice watching them back to back that are harder to spot when there are weeks or months between them. Two horror episodes in a row, for example. Earlier in season four, I noticed two episodes in a row that introduced significant elements to the Star Trek universe: “Data’s Day”, which introduced us to Keiko and Spot (who had both apparently been on the ship for some time, although we never saw them), followed by “The Wounded”, where we first met the Cardassians (who had been at war with the Federation for years, but somehow managed to avoid ever having been mentioned before).

I have also been meaning to mention what is, so far, my favorite DVD of the series: Season Three Disc Four. “Deja Q,” “A Matter of Perspective,” “Yesterday’s Enterprise” and “The Offspring.” It doesn’t get much better than that.