My tiki hut is not used to all this rain

No one makes videos of rain in Oregon.

I know this because I lived in Oregon for almost 30 years. Oregonians have a vastly different relationship with rain than do Californians.

In Oregon, rain was a little like a tired marriage in which the partners hand the remote to each other and periodically get up to make TV dinners. It’s workable, though not pleasant.

The Sacramento forecast calls for rain during much the month of January. For some of you, the idea of continuous rainy days may be hard to grasp.

We had zero rainfall last January, and 2015 was the year when the drought became a reality. Except, of course, for the people who live in 13,000-square-foot homes in Bel Air.

The rain didn’t bother me when I moved to Oregon in 1983. Dealing with rain was practically like living in Santa Barbara for a guy who was born in glacial Minnesota and lived in frigid Michigan and Ohio for the first 23 years of my life.

In Oregon, rain comes in two varieties: steady and spitting. When it spits, you can do most things, and your hair stays in place.

Steady rain, as Oregon has experienced during recent weeks, by my son’s report, is different. Your hair is always wet. Your shoulders are damp. The sky is funereal. Warm, dry socks at night are better than a martini. Ark jokes are common.

Since moving to California, I’ve noticed that people post visible rain on Facebook, as if it’s a remarkable event, unlike small temblors, which hardly merit a shrug. As I got used to my new normal weather, I found myself getting faintly angry when mornings weren’t brilliantly sunny.

In Portland, I had a friend who was a television meteorologist. She left because she got tired of repeating the same forecast: 46 and rainy. Her husband was a meteorologist at a rival station. He made “Bob the Weather Cat,” an actual cat, famous in Portlandia. They floated back to Dayton, Ohio, where they have remarkable and, at times, life-threatening weather. It was more interesting. Bob the Weather Cat was happy, too.

Now that we are looking at an extended stretch of rain, I have started hearing complaints. Griping about the rain in Portland fell on deaf, sodden ears. You won’t hear me muttering about the rain, although I notice that the rain is making my lawn turn a funny, unrecognizable color. Green.

One night, I so marveled at heavy rain in my pool that I made a video of it. I would not have done that if I still lived in Oregon. But in Oregon, I never would have thought of having a backyard pool, or, for that matter, a tiki hut, which I enjoy. Here, both seem to fit. At least they did before we had all this rain.

This story was originally published January 9, 2016 at 4:01 PM with the headline "My tiki hut is not used to all this rain."