My Siberian Umbrella

Rain streaks across the cracked windshield of my car streaming down I-5. Endless spring really summer but when its in the 40's at night its like a non-season.

I tried being a "true Oregonian" today and walking without an umbrella. Can't say I like it much. I prefer my trusty Siberian umbrella, which was left behind by a 7th grade Russian exchange student, literally from Siberia, back in the day (90's day). It is industrial strength and yet beautiful. I am convinced it will last forever and I haven't lost it yet which never happens to me.

Does rain falling naturally, without banging into a machine constructed around a (hybrid!) internal combustion engine, or seen by human eyes on cultivated straight furrows of crops, fall in a less linear pattern?

I was thinking about Russia today as my colleagues were bantering about the Gulf. Will it ever recover? This is not an "existential BP" issue only, as Interior Secretary Salazar has said. This is an issue for: fishermen whose livelihoods (and identities) are likely lost forever, a region known for seafood and hospitality, a nation that supposedly climbed out of the industrial revolution to the more evolved post-industrial society.

Well here we are, ravaging the Gulf as Russia ravaged its environment cranking out tanks during the Cold War.

And we won't even have any beautiful flowered umbrellas to show for it. Only dead shrimp and greasy pelicans.