Time off, toilets and tornadoes

It's been a great vacation. I don't wanna go back.

I even got my request granted today for some good Mexican food (never mind that I'm in East Texas and closer to Louisianna and Cajun country and not Southwest Texas and close to Mexico). But the Mexican food was good. Real good. Worth-driving-half-an-hour-to-get-to-it good.

Unfortunately, the "good" did not carry over to the ladies' room, where there was first no place to put my purse, so I placed it on the water tank on the back of the toilet. The toilet, I found out in an unfortunate way, was not bolted to the floor, so it wobbled. When the toilet wobbled, my purse wobbled with it, fell over and proceded to dump its contents into the wobbly toilet.

Contents that included my digital camera.

So much for the memories.

Hello lots and lots of soap.

I had a newfound sympathy for my brother when his glasses fell into the hole of an outhouse during one of his Boy Scout camping trips. "Until you've had to use a fishing pole to get it out of a 40-foot-deep shitter, you have no idea," he wrote. Well, I have some small idea, but he's probably right.

I was just starting to get my sense of humor back (though not much else) when Chris texted me from Gillette to let me know that a tornado had just touched down in Laramie. Great. I come to Tornado Country Texas, less than a hundred miles from hurricane-ravaged Louisianna, only to have a tornado touching down in Laramie, Wyoming.

I mentioned this to Chris, who said he thought I'd appreciate the irony in the whole thing. Irony? Yes. The possibility that people I know could be hurt or that the contents of my home could lay scattered over town? ... not so much. However, it did put the tragedy of my waterlogged camera into perspective. Attitude? Check.

I called Ryan, who lives in my building and assured me that our building was standing and that while the rest of the employees were huddled in the basement waiting for the worst to pass, he, Jesse and Garren were standing on the sidewalk, watching the sky because another twister was supposed to be touching down soon. He sounded stoked.

A man after my own heart.

The only tornadoes I've been "lucky" enough to see were because while everyone else huddled in the basement at CAM-PLEX, the tech directors and I stood in the loading bay of the theater and watched them form, touch down and go back up.

Phenomenal experience, by the way, if ever you're feeling slightly suicidal and in need of an on-the-run (literally) lesson in meteorology.

We leave for Huntsville (Texas) tomorrow morning, then we'll turn north and start the long trek home by way of Oklahoma and Kansas.

But I'd really rather just come back to the lake, the turtles, the catfish and the chameleons. That would be alright with me.