A short one today as I recover from travel and hope I can tether through my phone.

Today the oldest and I traveled to the in-laws house but before we left, I got to show off my psychic powers. Before that, though, I have to talk about the omens.

First Omen: after a hot but relatively dry summer, the day we were scheduled to travel typhoon 11 decided to arrive and dump a bunch of rain on us.

Second Omen: the rain that arrived was in a storm front, depicted in red (bad) and maroon (damned bad) on the weather map, that followed our exact path straight into Niigata.

Third Omen: several bullet train tracks had already been shut down.

Fourth Omen: it was raining hard enough that the drain on our balcony began to back flow in a new way. It didn’t flow onto the balcony, but it was noisy, as if it were mocking our attempts to travel during a typhoon.

Fifth Omen: about an hour before we left, the rain began to stop but it was raining just hard enough that we would need to carry umbrellas. However, as we left our apartment, the rain had become little more than random sprinkles and we didn’t actually need umbrellas. My psychic powers—which some say is simply pessimism—kicked in and I told our oldest to bring her umbrella anyway. I told her that about halfway to the station the rain would fall and fall hard.

Sixth Omen: Sure enough, almost exactly halfway to station we had to rush to get our umbrellas out as the sky opened up in downpour that left me soaked from the middle of my thighs down to my toes. The joke here is that once we were at the station, we’d be indoors or on trains the entire rest of the trip, meaning we no longer needed the umbrellas and they were just dead weight.

After that the trip went pretty well. The only real problems we had were the storm had swung to the Japan Sea and the wind slowed down our express train from Echigo-Yuzawa to Naoetsu. Luckily we were able to catch our local train and are now happily resting at the in-laws.

Seventh Omen: Too happily.