Rain Without Rinse

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoIt rained this morning. Properly, too. The kind of rain that drums on the roof with real conviction and makes you think, briefly and optimistically, that it might wash the sky clean.

It didn’t.

The haze stayed exactly where it was, as if it had read the forecast and decided to stay in. Rain and haze together is a curious combination. Wet and dim at the same time. Like being handed a glass of water through a net curtain.

The roads, naturally, responded in the only way they know. Heavy. Slow. That familiar Klang Valley shuffle, everyone edging forward with headlights on at an hour that has no business needing headlights. I listened to the wipers keep time and tried not to calculate how late I’d be.

As it happens, I wasn’t. Things got sorted on time. I’d like to claim this was skill. It was mostly the accumulated benefit of a week spent learning where everything lives in someone else’s arrangement. Familiarity, it turns out, is a time-saving device.

And then, a small thing that pleased me out of all proportion.

A new keyboard. The NuPhy 75, sitting on the desk like a well-dressed guest who has arrived early and is too polite to say so. Compact, neat, with that soft, considered clack that makes typing feel faintly ceremonial. I spent longer than strictly necessary testing it. A few sentences. Then a few more. Then a sentence about nothing at all, purely to hear it.

Is it ridiculous to be cheered by a keyboard? Probably. But we spend so much of the day with our hands on the things we use, and it’s nice when one of them feels like it was made by someone who cared. Small comforts. Tactile ones. I’ll take them.

After that, I couldn’t honestly tell you what happened.

The rest of the day went by in a blur. Not a bad blur. Just one of those stretches where hours fold into each other and you surface at the end with a vague sense of having been busy and very little memory of the specifics. If anyone asks, I was diligent. I’m fairly sure I was.

Evening. Dinner. The quiet relief of sitting down to a meal without a list running in the back of the head.

And the best news of the day, saved, as these things often are, for the end: my colleague returns from holiday tomorrow.

The borrowed chair goes back to its owner. The sticky notes, the curious filing system, the small mysteries I’d only just begun to solve, all of it returns to the person who actually understands it. I’ll hand it over with something between gratitude and mild reluctance. I’d only just got the coat to fit.

Still. There’s a particular lightness in knowing the stretch is nearly done. A week of carrying a bit extra, and tomorrow the load gets shared again.

The haze will probably still be there in the morning.

But the keyboard will be too.