Thursday 15 February 2024: I love listening to rain

One of the things I like about rain is to listen to it bouncing on the roof during the night. I love being in a tent or a caravan when it rains. The sound is so soothing. The problem is, it sends me to sleep and I then miss it all. Especially if there’s a humdinger of a storm to go with it. When I miss one of those too, I get really upset.

Although we’re in a bungalow, it’s very rare that we hear the rain on the roof. Sometimes it throws itself at the windows on one side of the house or the other. But even then, the overhang is so deep over our bedroom window that the only time I can hear it is if the window is open. And if the rain’s already throwing itself against the bedroom window, it comes in and we have to close the window again.

During Tuesday night, the dog woke me up three times. He didn’t want to go out. He was just mooching or licking or having a wander. My ears are so tuned in to him that the slightest sound he makes wakes me up. The third time he woke me up the poet woke up too. But not because he could hear the dog. He woke up because rain was bouncing on the roof and we could hear it! And I hadn’t even noticed that, so busy was I listening to the dog.

I strove to stay awake for a few minutes to listen to it, but no. It rocked me straight back to sleep. So when the dog woke up again, and this time he wanted out, it was the poet who heard him and who took him out. It had stopped raining, otherwise the dog would have refused point blank to go out and he would have been fidgeting for the next hour.

Rain is my go-to choice for white noise. I can’t be bothered with all of that howling wind or tweeting birds or chirping crickets. I like mostly plain rain, the heavier the better, and if there’s thunder and lightning then that’s good too. But rather than send me to sleep at my desk, it helps me to focus. I have rain on my mobile phone. I have rain on my mp3 player. And I have rain on YouTube. Joanna Penn likes to listen to rain too, so I’m in good company.

I had a lot of work to get through yesterday and I had to go straight into it. I did do it in Pomodoros, though. And the white noise of choice on my Pomodoro timer is… yup, you’ve guessed it. Rain. (TickTick really is ace.) The Pomodoro makes sure I focus for 50 minutes and the rain shuts everything else out. If the poet’s there, I put my earphones in. If he isn’t, I don’t have to. If it’s raining outside, though, it’s a distraction.

In between the editing, I started today’s blog post and I noticed that yesterday’s had the wrong day on it. It was easily fixed on here, but when I went to change it on Facebook, there it was gone. Facebook was broken. And had been for around 45 minutes by the time I spotted it. Oh dear. I did a quick clean up on X instead, removing another couple of months’ worth of posts, and then came back to the page.

Then I noticed something…the pdf I was checking against the proof-read and corrected pdf I sent last time had new material in it. Material I’d not seen before. Ever. Let alone proof-read or amended.

And my foot came off the gas…

I mean, call me old-fashioned, but isn’t that a tad unprofessional? No wonder the job was taking me a lot longer than I thought it would.

We were going out and I wasn’t going to rush the job any more. I showed the poet, then closed down and called it a day. I’ll start again today, but I won’t be killing myself doing it. And yes, I’ve made a note of it in the cover email that will be accompanying this pdf back to the client.