This would have been the day I set out on foot to explore my new neighborhood, if it hadn't rained steadily all day. It's not one of those rainstorms with the big Midwestern drops that you can almost dodge while you walk. No, this is that fine spray that soaks through your clothes and into your skin and hair as soon as you walk out the door. It's the rain that fogs up your glasses and soaks your socks and chills your bones, until you want nothing more than to be wrapped in a warm robe, sitting in front of a blazing fireplace. On your chaise longue, of course.

So I did laundry instead. It was the first load I've done in my new-used washer, and I found myself bouncing out of the chair to check on it every few minutes. I called Mom twice to ask her what the machine was doing. Once I plunged my hands into the water to make sure nothing was stuck, because the agitator had stopped agitating. (Apparently it's supposed to do that at some point during the cycle.)

Until today I didn't know (or care) how many places there are inside a dryer for lint to accumulate. There's the lint screen, of course, but when you take that out to clean it, you find a whole lint village, a lint Brigadoon, in the hazy heather below. And the more you shove your arm inside the barrel of the dryer, the more lint you're likely to come out with. In the door of the machine, I found lint hiding in all the nooks and crannies (well, just the nooks, really; I don't believe there were any appreciable crannies).

The dryer sits against an inside wall in the garage, and it vents into a little alcove. (As do I at times.) At some point, I'm sure, I'll be sweeping up lint from there, too.

Since it was raining just as much at Pacific Bell Park as it was here, there was no ballgame to watch on TV. I briefly considered taking in a film. I haven't been to a movie for weeks, since I started the moving process. But the puddles in the driveway, progressively getting wider and deeper, convinced me to spend my Sunday afternoon in my new home. I pulled the lounge chair next to the sliding glass door in the family room and read for a couple of hours, just as I said I wanted to do when I moved.

Conditions outside didn't phase the boys next door. I heard the rhythmic slapping of their basketballs on the wet concrete all day. Earlier I saw the twelve-year-old in his yellow slicker playing with a hose, randomly spraying it into the falling rain. Sometimes the simple pleasures of childhood are so inviting that I resent being a grownup as something that happened to me against my will. Not today, though. I had no inclination to romp in the swampy gravel lot, and even less to make it swampier.

I was up early again to rescue my paper, but it was too late for the main news section. I hung a few pages up to dry, but the front page didn't survive being smeared in a mud puddle. All of the advertising sections were of course in perfect condition.