It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

 With the weather having been rainy all week, and having turned this evening to just a light sprinkle, and with a bit of a nip in the air (around 26 c, which is about 78 f), I decided to venture out for a holiday season walk to the nearby Alfamart, just past the gas station on the main thoroughfare close by. 

Donning my unnecessary coat and hat for the sake of mood, I set off up my street, past the line of conspicuously less than gaily adorned houses, along the rows of humming air conditioning units, tuning up no doubt for a Christmas choir performance later that night and, turning the corner at the top of the street, came upon a lake where a road used to be. 

This was no snow drift. This was not wintry ice. No this was a muddy brown lake that had conquered the entire road between a fence on one side and a gurgling irrigation ditch on the other. 

What to do? Turn back? Never! I am not the sort of person who turns back. I always move forward. So I waded that murky winter marsh, not to be stopped by foul conditions. (I'll wash up later). Over the river and through the trees to the Alfamart we go! (I'll check for leeches when I get home).

From there on it was smooth sailing and I sloshed into the store with no further trouble. 

I had come for a bag of caramel corn, a pack of cigarettes, and a fly trap if I could find one. You see, at this festive season of the year, the air here is filled not with flurries of snow but with flurries of small, exceedingly annoying flies. These flies do not behave in the relatively polite manner of regular flies. These tiny seasonal flies land on everything, buzz in your ears, fly into your eyes, try to crawl up your nose. And of course they love the dinner plates. 

These flies are rather slow compared to other sorts of flies, and so they are swatted dead more easily. But what use is that if they happen to be sitting on your broccoli, or investigating your seafood pasta?

Unfortunately, I found no fly traps at the Alfamart. And this is the second store I've tried today. The things must be selling like Christmas lights these days. 

The vast brown lake had not moved on my way back home, but on this crossing I came upon a man traveling toward me on his own way and we smiled cheerily and greeted one another merrily, amused at the chilling challenges of our separate sojourns.

God rest ye merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay.