Weathering the Storms

Guess hanging out with Li'l Random on Saturday and Sunday has rubbed off on me, as I'm feeling a bit random myself today:

It's that time of year again, when my allergies decide to stage a full-blown attack, manifesting in rotating symptoms; it started with the sore throat phase and then moved into the horrible, hacking cough phase. Late last week, one of my coughing fits caused several co-workers to gather around to make sure I wasn't about to keel over; according to my boss, I sounded "quite deathlike." The coughing has died down quite a bit in both frequency and intensity, and now the symptoms have moved to stopping up my nose and ears, with a hint of itchiness around the eyes. Joy!

My warmest thoughts go out to all of the blog monkeys who have been made powerless and dispossessed by ice storms; so far I know Bubblegum Tate, Redneck Diva, and my parents were all affected, and I'm sure there are some others out there as well. Most of them have had power restored by now; here's hoping the next round of storms doesn't knock them out again.

As we should have come to expect, bad weather in OK means that my best bud Cap'n Shack-Fu is on the road again; apparently, the boy is too darn good at his job, and so now he gets asked for by name. We keep trying to tell him if he slacks off more he might get to stay home, but I guess it's just not in his nature. Some people, huh? Anyway, he had only been back from his last deployment for a little over a month, so we're all hoping that this will be a much shorter time away.

While we're on the bad weather topic -- a week ago I got a call from PigPen asking if I could come pick him and Squiggly's sis up. "Car problems?" I asked. "You could say that," he replied. Turns out that while traveling down to Dallas to cheer on Cap'n Peanut at the White Rock Half Marathon*, the heavy rain caused PigPen's Mountaineer to hydroplane, and despite his best efforts it crashed head first into the concrete guardrail, deploying the airbags and pretty much demolishing the front end of the vehicle. Both of them escaped with minimal injuries, thank the heavens, but that kind of put a dent in PigPen's plans to sell the thing.

Last Tuesday while having lunch with Cap'n Shack-Fu and Li'l Random I was lamenting the fact that with PigPen's new work schedule (2-11 PM) and Shack's deployment I'm effectively losing both of my regular sparring partners. "Oh, well," said I, "guess I'll just have to start beating up on Li'l Random as a substitute." Li'l Random declared dramatically, "You better be careful, because maybe the partner will suddenly become -- the spar! Why don't you chew on that for a while!" Hard to argue with logic like that . . .


*The good Cap'n finished the 13 mile run in 1 hour 40 minutes, averaging under 8 minutes a mile and finishing ahead of 93% of the runners; way to go, Peanut!