It has begun. The Central Mexican yearly ritual has finally arrived, a month late I might add, and life as we know it has changed and will be different for the next 10-12 weeks.

The rainy season is here.

I wrote about it two months ago. I told of my not-so-excited-anticipation of this yearly and, unless you want to leave and go to the desert for 12 weeks, unavoidable act of God. The rainy season changes EVERYTHING.

1. When it is the dry season, you can leave the house on a moment's notice with nary a thought in your head about it. I mean, you can be impulsive.

"Oh, Honey let's run out and get some ice cream."

"Let's do, sweetheart and while we're out, let's go to a movie!"

"Super! Let's go!"

This little scene is on hold now for the next 12 weeks.

2. You cannot leave the house together-ever. Someone has to stay home, at all times, keeping vigil over the leaking windows. You see, Mexican homebuilders, for reasons known surely only to the Almighty, build windows to leak. Now follow me carefully here.

Central Mexico has had, since God created the heavens and the earth, a rainy season. Central Mexican homebuilders know this. They teach this in catechism. Nevertheless, they build windows that leak like Niagara Falls.

The pre-rainy season activity, which is sometime in the middle of April, is to lay in a supply of new terrycloth towels and waterproof tape. You must have the towels to stuff around the windowsills and the tape to plug the new holes that miraculously appear each rainy season.

3. We have birds. Oh, dear God, we have birds in outside aviaries in the back of our house. We have to be on the alert, day and night, for the tornado-strength winds, hurricane-force rain, and lighting bolts that could incinerate a bus so we can risk life and limb to keep them safe.

We do have large and ample caging with tarps big enough to cover most American Sports stadiums, protecting the birds. But here is what we are up against.

We have to keep the tarps in the ready position to be able simply to pull down over the aviaries when the rain begins.

"Why don't you just keep them covered all the time?" you ask.

The reason is that right before the daily storm hits, the air heats up to being able to boil water. This would, of course, cook the birds. We cannot have that at all. Therefore, we have to pull all the tarps up so the birds can have air to breathe and not cook. Then when the rains hit, we have to run out there and pull the covers over the whole aviary.

4. Washing clothes-don't ever get my wife started on this nightmare. Each rainy season the water that comes out of the taps turns a nice nicotine brown. This is because the mountain rains are so heavy that they overwhelm the city's water purification plants with muddy river water.

(This notion of a "water purification plant" is an oxymoron since you cannot drink the water anyway unless you want some amoebic parasite taking up residence in your gut!)

We combat this issue with a water purification system for which we paid dearly, making it possible to drink from the tap. But this does not work for the washing machine.

So my poor wife washes clothes that will have a brown tint to them until the rainy season is finished.

Life as we knew it has now changed. This is our third rainy season. It is an easy trade off.

I know what you are thinking,

"Why do you live there if it is like this?"

Two reasons:

1. It only lasts 10-12 weeks.

2. Does the name "Osama Bin Laden" ring a bell?