Staycation Day 6

Rain.  Did I mention rain?  Oh, I have... ok, how about really loud thunder and lots of lightening... did I mention that?  Or being clawed every 5 minutes?  Yeah, that pretty much sums up Day 6.

I had all sorts of wonderful plans for yesterday.  I was going to go in the morning to renew our firing range membership and poke some holes in paper targets while I was there.  Then come home, take a nap, then get back up and piddle around doing cartoons or something relaxing, then probably nap, then go run some errands.

Instead it was chock full of panting clawing panic husky, and screeching "I wanna be just like Meeshka" Loki freaking out, and thankfully Sam slept through it as usual.

I did manage some cartooning, paying of bills and throwing out of files I have no idea why we kept in the first place type of stuff in between storms, which seemed to arrive, last an hour, stop for an hour, start for an hour, etc.  It was very weird.

Around 2pm(ish) I saw a break in the storms and made a dash for the range (minus weapon) to renew, to Starbucks (of course), and some other errands, and getting back just in time for the next round of torrential downpours.

Lobsterman called just as I was washing the cool stackable Ikea plastic food containers, and while Meeshka decided there was something tasty under the kitchen shelves.  He's having fun out there at least.  I also discovered that stackable Ikea plastic food containers are impossible to get into the same shape they came in once you wash them.  Seriously, you need a PhD or trained monkey or something to get these things stacked the way they came.

Then I had to vacuum out under the cabinets to appease Meeshka, who was then all mad because I didn't simply reach under the cabinet and get the goodie and give it to her, so I had to pretend to reach in there with a goodie and pull it out and give it to her, but then she was all like "I know that wasn't THE goodie that was under there" and kept snorfling under the cabinet.

More storms, more clawing, more rain, then REALLY more rain, and just when you thought there couldn't be more rain... yep, more rain.

So... around 10pm I decided that I would try to go to bed, so I did, and started watching "Get Him To The Greek".  Russell Brand has this sort of repulsive appeal, and I've come into the movie about 6 times in the same spot (near the end) and wanted to watch it from the beginning (ok, I totally laugh at some parts of it, like when Puffy is running after them and gets hit by the car), but generally, meh.

It was at this point when the REAL thundering and downpouring started, so I moved into the living room to provide less clawing acreage when we started getting tornado warnings, so I bribed the dogs downstairs, gated them off and turned on the tv and iTunes loud to drown out the now roaring thunder, lightening and literally throwing buckets of water down... yard flooded AGAIN.  Apparently (from our local Facebook county breaking news page) there was a rapid river response down the street from us.  Its not even a river, its a tiny creek that always floods, but apparently its now a river.  The Baltimore tunnels are also under water, a bunch of roads are closed, and its just not pretty out there, but thankfully no Tornado.

While I hung out waiting for the storm, I did this:

I also got this picture of Meeshka and Sam, during a lull in the storms:

They never "snuggle" so that's about as close as they get. 

At this point, its 3am, and things finally settled down in the thunder arena that I herded the pups off to bed, but it was like sleeping while you wait for something to happen... I figured that as soon as I closed my eyes... it would thunder, so I got about 3 hours of sleep.

Apparently there's all sorts of roads closed and under water.  I have a very exciting annual doctor's appointment at 2pm

 Do I know how to staycation or what!

I'll leave early because I'm not sure what road I can take to get there, or whether I'll need a canoe.  I'll take pictures of the flooding if I find any on the way there, or to Starbucks, because seriously, if ever I need a Starbucks... its today!

Staycation Day 5

Neither rain, nor cold we keep me from my appointed round to the local landfill.

I love the landfill!  Its very organized with individual dumpsters for different types of junk.  There's this wonderful feeling of satisfaction with dumping a contractor bag full of junk into the dumpster and watching it get smooshed.  I love it!  For bulk stuff, you get to heave the items into really big dumpsters situated below a wall.  Its like your very own little world of stress relief.  The big burly guys who work there always try to help me toss my stuff, but I wave them off.  That's the fun part and dammit I'm gonna toss it in the bin!

I had two runs to the landfill, the second being some dry wall that we had in the very back of the back room (for some reason), and to make it fit in the RAV I had to break it up.  If you've never broken dry wall, I highly suggest buying a huge sheet of it, leaning it against a wall and karate kicking it.  It breaks really easy and makes you feel invincible.  I also got to toss in the huge glass screen door pane, but I was totally disappointed that it didn't shatter in a zillion pieces.  Even when I purposefully tossed the dry wall on it... nothing.  Now that's glass!

Next it was a drive over to Salvation Army with a huge contractor bag of clothes and purses, and then off to Starbucks... because its Starbucks and I needed Starbucks... seriously, I have to explain that?

On the way home I went to Lowes, where I bought the last two plastic (edible) shelving units... which means I have to go scout out another Lowes for more.  One major complaint with Lowes:  your self check-out needs one of those scanner wand things.  All of the other stores have them, so I have no idea why you don't... do you know how hard it is to scan a huge plastic shelf?  Well, it looked really hard because the guy in charge of the self checkout had to do it twice.

By the time I got home it was now POURING rain, so the only thing I could do (other than nap) was continue purging the back room and minimizing the kitchen counter stuff, so that's what I did... and frankly as I was working in the back room the only thing that came to mind was: "On this episode of Hoarders... Penny suffers a hernia and goes insane".  I did manage to make enough room to put up the two new shelves and stock them with boxes.

Did I mention it was POURING rain?  Yep, for hours, and hours, and hours, and frankly when the water level in the back yard was getting alarmingly high... I wondered if Katia was ahead of schedule (apparently we're getting Lee... which needs to go to Texas), and we were getting a rather disturbing amount of water coming into the outside back porch... duh because I had accidentally knocked the drain pipe off the back gutter, so I went out in the POURING rain to fix that.

During the POURING rain, Meeshka decided that she wanted to stay out in it and dig for grubs, taking a break once in a while to bang on the door to come in, shake her mud everywhere, then go back out.  So it was generally a few hours of moving heavy boxes, getting showered with wet husky, moving heavy boxes, more husky shower, Loki wanting out, then in, then out, then in, drying feet, and finally Sam joined the grub hunt and it was three soaked huskies versus me.  Whoot.

I gave up and did some Angry Birds relaxation, read (Dick Cheney's book... which is really good so far), and watched some tv.  Sometime in the middle of the night I woke up and saw an infomercial for a chair-like device with handles that you sit in and wiggle around and tone your midsection.  I was a bit disturbed by the claim that kept scrolling at the bottom, and yes, in the middle of the night I got up and took a picture of it:

Frankly, I don't think I want 7 pounds of fat running loose in my body