Life is like a hurricane

Good men through the ages
Tryin' to find the sun
And I wonder
Still I wonder
Who'll stop the rain?

-- Creedence Clearwater Revival

I was driving to work tonight with my almost-4-year-old in the back seat, and she kept telling me my windshield "washers" were too slow or too fast. The rain and wind was squally and it was tough to see at times. Then she asked me to just shut off the rain. :)

I've been putting off asking and bugging the bosses this week about the job because we had a hurricane suddenly pop up out of nowhere.

It hit tonight, came and went. It's funny reading these stories we write about how it "hit" here and "didn't hit" there. A hurricane is hundreds of miles across!!!! Yet they say where the eye lands, that's the equivalent of the epicenter of an earthquake I guess. We didn't have too much damage... enough I guess. I had to pick up my daughter after work tonight and I was tense the whole way home. There's no power in most places, so the streets were very dark and I'd say 70 percent of the traffic lights were dark and 20 percent were blinking.

People here have become remarkably polite during hurricanes lately. Perhaps that's because Florida has been hit by six in the past year, and we finally got the etiquette down. Still, I was scared on my ride home with the baby. Since so many of the signals were dark and there were no street lights, I really couldn't tell I was coming upon an intersection until the last moment, and these are streets I have traveled well, most days, for 10 years.

No one bothered to put up shutters... it wasn't like the ghost town of past hurricanes. It was scheduled to be a Cat 1, and it was no more than that. Turns out the thing was supposed to hit north of us (all the yucky weather was in the south of the storm) but it took a jog to the south at the last moment and I guess we were spared something, I dunno what. It was a sissy storm compared to others I have been through. It threw my lawn chairs around the yard, I guess that's one thing I can bitch about. And there was a downed tree in the road I thought I wouldn't be able to get around, but I managed to.

I was at work the whole time during the storm. I was offered the day off but went in anyway. Hey, it's a Cat 1, what am I afraid of, right? Well, we had one of our budget meetings in the conference room that is on the ninth floor on the outskirts of the building. I would realize later that this particular budget meeting (I had at least two previous meetings to this one in the same room with no remarkable circumstances) was right about the time the damn hurricane was landfalling. It was early evening but it was so dark outside we could see our reflections in the glass windows. The glass windows THAT WERE BREATHING IN AND OUT AS IF THEY WOULD BURST AT ANY MOMENT. My editor seemed kinda jumpy about this too, and when I pointed out that debris was flying about at nine stories up, he seemed more nervous, and at one point we all stood up for the remainder of the meeting. As if that would buy us time running and screaming from shattering panes of glass.

It was either that or get under the conference table I guess.

So anyway, that explains where I am with the job thing.

I probably had a small window of opportunity to jab the bosses about it at the beginning of the week, but I wasn't about to bring up my personal crap when all of the state was threatened with death and destruction, LOL.

This week I applied at two places though... both in Pittsburgh... and sent out a letter of interest via email here and there for stuff I found on the Internet. I don't know what is drawing me back to Pittsburgh so much. I guess I'm thinking, now is as good a time as any.

(Happy birthday, mom.)