As a Davao City-born, Pasay City-bred Batangueno, I would hate to be in the place of my birth at this particular time.

Mindanao has been taking a beating in the past few weeks, not from communist rebels or Abu Sayyaf bandits or even religious cults predicting the next “true” end of the world, but from Mother Nature.

Ever since Typhoon Pablo hit the Vis-Min area one month ago today, it seems that sunshine has become rather scarce down south.

Whether brought about by typhoons, tropical depressions, or just a lot of rain clouds, Mindanao has been constantly drenched for the past 30 days.

Not that there’s anything wrong with a lot of rainfall. Singing in the rain can be quite romantic if you are crooning a special song to a special someone. Or it can be idiotic if you’re singing to yourself and all the dogs in your neighborhood bark at you to stop.

But last December and this January should be the best time of year throughout the country, weather-wise.

This should be the cool and dry time of year when there’s no need for electric fans or air conditioners to lull yourself to sleep at night. Not even those oddities known as humidifiers which are supposedly substitutes for air-cons. At our Christmas party held at home last Dec. 24, my elder daughter thought it would be a good idea to rent a couple of the big gadgets to cool the inside as well as the outside of the house.

I believe the brand name is Iwata or Hiwata or something like that. Hiawata, maybe?

When it arrived, the technician poured several gallons of water into the gizmo, then switched it on. Lo and behold, the room became a few degrees cooler. As a master of awful puns, I said it must be all that “wata” in the Iwata that caused the cooling effect.

Few people appreciate the merits of horrendous puns these days…

But it’s just distributing water vapor into the air, I told myself. So what’s the big deal? And isn’t too much water vapor bad for you? You could catch pneumonia once you inhaled too much of the H2O mist, thereby causing your lungs to clog up.

I don’t have the faintest idea if there is any validity to such thinking. If it were true, then it stands to reason that everyone who lives in high altitudes would be sick all the time. So yes, the logic is probably faulty. But it’s one of the things that people talk about when shooting the breeze during social occasions.

Anyway, there’s been much talk lately about abnormal weather being the new normal. This means that lots of rainfall will be our lot from hereon. Not just in Davao, but in Pasay City and Batangas, too.

Good thing I now live in Paranaque City. Maybe the weather won’t be as bad there compared to the rest of the country for the most part of this year.

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