Day 261 - Top 10 Stuff

Well, another week is gone. I haven’t been down in the dumps but I haven’t been exactly jumping for joy either – my rhythm is messed up. With Al back in the sand – and another four to five months of this crap – just existing is becoming a way of life. There is another hurricane coming – this time for Texas though. My good friend from California is in TX right now doing hurricane relief work, so my mind and thoughts are on her right now.

In honor of Hurricane Rita, I drafted this “Top 10” list for anybody who is on the outskirts of a hurricane (I wrote it after Katrina – but didn’t think I would get to share my wisdom this soon – could there BE anymore hurricanes/tropical storms this year? Yikes!):

TOP 10 WAYS TO KNOW THAT YOU SURVIVED THE OUTSKIRTS OF A HURRICANE:

1. Cars cease to be the status symbols that they once were – the only thing that makes a ‘sexy’car is how full its gas tank is.


2. Speaking of sexy, nothing makes a man look better than when he is carrying a generator towards your front door.


3. You feel guilty because somehow you didn’t lose your phone or your power in ‘the big storm’, but your guilt is quickly erased the next day when your power and phone have to be shut off to fix your neighbor’s lines.


4. ‘Modern Conveniences’ becomes a relative term for those dealing with several days of power loss. Being lucky enough to have a roof over your head and a soft bed to sleep in sounds really good compared to the alternatives that you hear about on your battery powered radio.


5. Horses start to look like a pretty efficient form of transportation after two hours spent in a fuel line to get less than 10 gallons of gas.


6. Your coworkers begin to seem a lot less annoying to you after you realize how much money you can save by carpooling with them.


7. You look forward to going to the office every day because you still have power and air conditioning there. As you lie awake in sticky, hot, “half-sleep”, you can’t wait to ‘push papers’ in the morning.


8. You begin to wish that the looters that you’re seeing on TV would steal Geraldo Rivera too so that you wouldn’t have to listen to his histrionics anymore.


9. You start to really regret not putting a chain saw on your wedding registry.


10. Instead of counting down how many days your hubby has left of his deployment to Iraq, you start counting down how many days are left in hurricane season.