Set fire to the rain

I set fire to the rain and watched it burn.

Adele has finally figured it out. She put into the chorus of a song that is insanely catchy song (which was also insanely overplayed on the radio for quite a while) two of the things that I most love. Think about it: watching stuff burn and playing in the rain. It's genius!

I am a boy scout (I get to use the present tense because I am an Eagle Scout [by a few days before my 18th birthday] so I'm a scout for life now). When I went on camp-outs as a teen, we always did a bunch of fun stuff. I have to admit though that my favorite part of pretty much every camp-out was the campfire. I could happily sit for hours and watch fire slowly consume the wood inside the ring. It's a beautiful process. No two flames are ever the same, but the action of burning continues the same.
I am a desert rat. I grew up in the Sonora desert. It doesn't rain, except for when it RAINS. Every fall and every spring, there is always a short window of these storms that are simply fantastic. They roll in with a fury (think post-haboob storms) and the rain comes pouring down. When I was in elementary school, there was nothing more glorious than the rainy day schedule with its attendant puddles and insanity of kids cooped up in classrooms.
When I first got to Germany in April of 2007, one of the few things that I could actually do in German was to pray. When we visited people on my first day there, they asked me to say the prayer at the start of the meeting. I did so, and at the end, I looked up and saw people staring at me with puzzled looks. My heart sank as I was certain I'd inadvertently used some profanity or offended someone. It turned out that they were all just confused because in my prayer, I had expressed gratitude for the rain that had fallen that morning. Growing up in the desert, there is seemingly always a drought. Whenever any rain falls, there was reason to give praise to God for every drop. Germany is not in a desert, and the Germans found my desert rat perspective completely foreign. Old habits die hard, I still rejoice every time rain clouds roll in (I actually started this post before I knew that it would be sprinkling today!).
Those are two of my idiosyncrasies. I hope you enjoyed some of my favorite things. What are yours?