Yesterday was a harrowing day. The weather started out looking not entirely bad, but over the course of the day I tracked the weather using the Environment Canada website. For some strange reason they couldn't tell it was going to rain in Winnipeg until an hour before it happened yesterday.

This was an issue since I was without my rain jacket.

My walk home from the office is around one and a half kilometers, and when I stepped outside I looked at the sky and thought "Maybe I can make it!". I was totally wrong.

About two hundred meters in a light drizzle started. It was time to take off my tie. I quickly untied it while walking and slipped it into my backpack. I, the eternal optimist, thought "This could still work!". Nature had other plans though.

Another hundred meters on my trek home the skies opened and a torrent of biblical proportions began to fall on me. At this point a new strategy was in order. I ducked into a doorway only to discover that no - it provided no shelter from the rain, and yes - the rain was not going to stop anytime soon.

As the wind picked up I thought back to some previous storms I endured, most of them at camp. The old phrase 'Cotton kills' came to mind and I knew what needed to be done.

Without breaking pace I walked down Memorial Boulevard and started to take off my shirt. One woman I passed while changing said "Not a bad idea" in passing. It was a good idea. With a shirt, you are simply some dork who got caught in the rain without any shelter. Without a shirt, you are a man's man in a quest to battle the elements on your commute home.

Being in the rain without clothing is a wonderful experience. When you are wearing clothing all you usually think about is “How wet am I now?” about twenty times a minute. Without clothes you know you are simply wet, and chances are you cannot get any more wet. This frees you to think about other things like what to prepare for dinner, how to access to your neighbors Internet connection, and ocelots.

As manly as it was, by the time I could see the apartment, all I could think of was my wife, large towels, and a warm cup of tea.