How Dry I Am

 
This summer the weather in my hometown of Ratlanta, Georgia has been quite fleadiculous, starting with unsqueakable heat followed by daily torrential downpours that have left me so waterlogged I’ve felt like a drowned rat. I’ve been up to my muzzle in rainwater, so last week I decided to shake the droplets off my whiskers and scuttle to someplace warm and dry.
 
Yuma, Arizona seemed like a great place to go, as it’s been noted by the Guinness Book of World Records as the sunniest place on earth. So Saturday I jumped aboard the first old Cheez-It box I found drifting under my local manhole, and floated my way from one municipal sewer system to another all the way out to the desert.
 
I arrived to conditions very dry indeed, as evidenced by the fact that, due to the sewer water having evaporated, I had to scuttle the last hundred miles on paw. When I arrived I found myself quite unprepared for another aspect of Yuma weather: I, in my haste to seek out places with low humidity levels, failed to take note of the heat! With average August temperatures in excess of 105 degrees, Yuma did more than rival that which I’d sought to escape in my hometown – it blew it out of the water! (Literally. That’s why Ratlanta is so wet: the water hasn’t been blown out yet.)
 
Sure, it was dry heat, but 105 degrees is still 105 degrees, and I was certainly way over my muzzle in what I could handle. My rubber rat fur had nearly melted off by the time I found a cactus to take shade under, and the lack of said fur, combined with the oppressively hot Yuma sun, left me with a vicious sunburn, making me a very crispy critter indeed. Thankfully I was able to chew through that cactus’s wall with my sharp incisors to reach the reservoir of water within. Swimming in it was pawsome, but steam did waft off my hot flesh as I ratty-paddled about. (S’alright: my own personal sauna!) So although I find myself once again up to my muzzle in rainwater, I’m back home now, much preferring the rains of Ratlanta to the dryness of the American Southwest! (No offense intended to my desert-dwelling kangaroo rat brethren.)
 
If you find yourself in waterlogged weather conditions this summer, do your best to shake the droplets off your own whiskers and keep splashing through those puddles, or if your blood’s a-boilin’ in the flealentless heat, borrow some incisors from a fellow rat and chew through a cactus wall. All of us can remember that, soon enough, Mother Nature will change her finicky mind, and we’ll be freezing our scaly tails off!
 
Keepinʼ it squeak,
Bob