If someone had asked a few years ago what my most
important fatherly skillsets would be, Rainbow Loom wouldn’t have
made the list. Yet, thanks to the
Genoa Low, my talent in assisting my daughters to make anything and everything out
of colorful rubber bands has become second-to-none in value.
A Genoa Low is sort of like a polar vortex, except that it
starts in the Alps and throws a low-pressure system over everything to the
south. If you look at a radar map of
this region right now, there’s a counterclockwise pattern from Austria, down through
most of Italy, across the Adriatic, and then back up through much of the
Balkans and Slovenia. This front just
circles around and around and has pretty much sat right in this position for
all of July.
The result is cooler weather and lots and lots and lots of
rain. The rain that caused the flooding
in Bosnia and Serbia in May was a result of one of these systems, and this is
one of the coolest July’s on record in both Slovenia and Croatia (we really
lucked out with the weather at the sea last weekend…if we were there now, we
might not be doing much swimming). Not
surprisingly, it’s the main topic of small talk these days, and you don’t need
to know Slovene to join in. You just
look up at the sky, throw up your hands, and shake your head.
So, we’ve resolved to a lot of apartment-based activities. A main one is hunting down Rainbow Loom
tutorials on YouTube. Rosetta and Celia
have graduated well beyond Packer bracelets and necklaces and have now built
bananas, owls, Hello Kitty, Elsa from Frozen, Barbie bikinis, and much more. And I’ve become the go-to-guy when they get
stuck (“DADDY! I need your
help!!”). I’m not sure how Chantelle
weaseled her way out of that duty, but to be honest, I’m glad she did. It’s fun.
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