The rainy season.

If you've listened to me brag about living in Mexico for more than, oh, half a minute, you've heard me talk about how the weather is always beautiful and spring-like.

In the past two months, we've experienced many, many more seasons than just spring. I don't feel bad about this. After all, this is why we came down here before rashly selling our home in Seattle. We needed to see what it was really like here.

When we arrived, we quickly learned it was palmetto bug season. Palmetto bugs look like overgrown cockroaches. Like cockroaches, they're a little horrifying and they move really, really fast. They respond best to a great big stomp of the shoe -- which was nice, because by the time we got the big cans of Raid, palmetto bug season was over.

Next came dust season. The Spanish word for dust is "polvo." This is a handy word to know if you're going to communicate with your housekeeper. It also helps at the grocery store. "Polvo de horno" . . . dust of the oven . . . baking powder!

Then we had construction season. This is like a plague of locusts, only it's a lot of workers crawling all over your house, creating lots and lots of polvo. Yes, these two seasons generally overlap.

Just on the heels of construction, we had mosquito/bobo season. Bobos are harmless, but annoying, mosquito lookalikes. We saw billions of them. We knew a couple of them were actually mosquitoes, because we got the bites to prove it. Fortunately, mosquito season seems to last about as long as palmetto bug season.

Thunderstorm season came next. John and Anita were here for this one. Very, very loud and dramatic. I thought it would continue for our entire time here -- but it seems to be over. (Unless I'm sleeping through them.)

Housefly season came upon us and lasted long enough for us to buy flyswatters. Between us, Ross and I killed seven or eight flies in one afternoon. Now they seem to be gone.

We're now about a week into the rainy season. We're having an unusual one. The average rainfall for July is nine inches. As of today, the 10th, we've had 8.59 inches. We've had 2.08 inches in the last 24 hours. Ross went out this morning and said the streets were like rivers. Yesterday he went upstairs to the studio and one of the drains was plugged and we had several inches sitting up there. He immediately dubbed it Lake Mirador. Fortunately, nothing leaked into the house.

It's now been raining long enough for me to learn the Spanish word for it: lluvia. Our cute little Lake Chapala Weather website is now saying: "Stop the lluvia -- no mas, por favor."

What could possibly be next? I'm quite sure there's no fire season here . . . unless one of the volcanoes erupts.