I have more mosquito bites than I can count. #IGTR

If you haven't noticed from the swelling, red, itching welts that are likely covering your entire body, or swarms in the grove, in your college, in your nightmares; then you've probably noticed on Facebook:  Houston, we have a mosquito problem.

You've experienced bad mosquito evenings at Rice before.  There was that one time last year during Powderpuff practice when the mosquito clouds at dusk were so thick that you counted no less than 25 bites by the time you were inside again.  You experienced an occasional bite at one of the forced picnics.  But unless your college's zombie apocalypse defense plan can easily be converted to defend against these bloodsucking monstrosities, there's no way you were prepared for this.

They descended upon us during parent's weekend.  Beginning that evening as you sat on an outside patio at a lovely non-servery dinner, you began to notice there were more mosquitoes about than usual.  Your parents offer to take you and friends to buy mosquito repellant this weekend.  By the time you go to the Target on Main Street the next day, they are completely sold out.  Same for the CVS in the Village. On the third or fourth try, you finally locate a few cans at a Walgreens you've never been inside before.

You spray the stuff all over your clothes, but still the mosquitos taunt you, getting inside your car and under your skin.

 

It's like Rice students are especially delicious.  Our blood must be like the fine wine of the mosquito world.

 

You've considered more drastic solutions.  How could one feasibly keep a pet bat?  Bats are mosquito eating machines, and why don't we have more?!  Then you realize that the mosquitoes have got you acting like a crazy person, and you resolve to just cover up every possible inch (itch) of skin until the cold front sets in on Thursday night.

I know the importance of a good weather app. #IGTR

If you go to Rice, you have probably discovered the importance of having a good weather app on your phone.  And I don't mean the questionably-accurate, Houston-wide average that is displayed on your home screen right beneath the time (who knows how many times that will lead you to disaster before you graduate).  No, what a Rice student requires is a zip-code specific application with an hourly breakdown of temperature and chance of precipitation.

Now, perhaps this year's freshmen have not had a chance to fully appreciate the necessity for such an app during the drought, and it's possible that returning students have allowed themselves to temporarily forget its utility.  I myself uninstalled my weather app over the summer and have since been too lazy to download it again.  This would have been fine, had I remembered Rice Rule #12: Always keep an umbrella in your backpack.

I had perhaps seen the temperature on my phone when I woke up in the morning, but it had been nothing out of the ordinary, likely somewhere in the high 90s.  No reason for me to investigate further.  The walk to my morning class was disgustingly hot and humid, as per usual.  The classroom, which I've been cursed to have a morning class in every single semester of my college career thus far, has an almost immediate soporific effect on me.  (Can you blame me?: the seats are relatively soft, the windows are way at the top near the ceiling, and the lights are almost always off as to accommodate a PowerPoint presentation.)  I fell into that terrible, desperately-trying-to-stay-awake-but-your-head-keeps-lolling-and-you-are-for-all-intents-and-purposes-unconscious waking sleep state, as per usual.

When the class was finally over (no, but really, who ever decided 75 minute morning classes were a good idea...), I emerged from the cavern only to find that not only had it started raining, but the sky was actually falling down.  As all the smart, prepared Rice kids fished inside their backpacks and came back up with a umbrellas and headed off into the downpour, I lingered underneath the overhang, cursing under my breath, realizing that my umbrella was still on the top shelf in my closet.

Now, you may think that should this ever happen to you, you will be fine.  You are wrong.  Because this only seems to occur when you are woefully inappropriately dressed.

Also, you will be at the farthest possible point on campus from your residential college.  You will realize you literally could not be any more physically removed from warm things (like dry clothes and lunch).

As I finally braced myself against the rain and stepped out into the elements, I realized... well, it wasn't so bad.  There's nothing quite like that intoxicating scent of petrichor during the first rain of the year.  Besides, Rice has a small campus anyway.