Random Thoughts from a Large Head

Most definitely the blahs.

Everyone watch out while Leia exits the building while the sun is still out. OK, it isn’t really out. It is pouring rain outside. But get out of my way because I’m leaving at 4:30.

I’ll be taking twenty youth down to KLTY – 94.9 tonight so they can host the radio show. Tune in at ten pm CST to hear them. They have a webcast if you are REALLY interested.

This rainy afternoon is making me sleepy. Think I shall go home and take a nap.

hi

So apparently I showed up in Dave’s dream very scientifically discussing the weather. I love weather. In middle school, I wanted to be a meteorologist on The Weather Channel. I would watch Jim Cantore and dream that one day I would be doing the weather up there, standing in front of the green screen, pointing out fronts and severe weather.

My favorite weather phenomena? Hurricanes. I lived in the panhandle of Florida growing up, and whenever there was a hurricane, I would make certain to turn on the television at 10 minutes before the hour to get the latest information. I plotted storms and watched their path. In college, my roommates laughed at me for plotting the storms on my handy map of the tropics.

As far as experience in hurricanes goes, I have been through several, none of them terrible. The only one we ever evacuated for was hurricane Opal in the late summer of 1995. The storm was a category 5 (the worst) while offshore and bearing down on the panhandle of Florida. My parents decided we should evacuate to Tallahassee (about 90 miles inland). So we packed up all our cars with everything we could. Our house was across the street from the bay, and a category 5 hurricane would produce flooding that would have put our house underwater. It’s funny when I think back on it. My sister and I were quite concerned with all our possessions. Our cars were filled with photo albums, mementos, etc. We made the drive to Tallahassee (normally 1.5 hours) in 7 hours. When we left our house, Opal was a category 5. As we sat on Highway 231, the storm was downgraded to a four. As we sat on Highway 20, a category 3.

We spent the night in Tallahassee, then made our way very slowly back to Panama City once the storm had passed the next day. At the Bay County border, we were stopped. They had shut down the county and were not letting anyone in. There we sat on a lonely stretch of highway outside Wewahitchka waiting. When we finally made it back home, the only major damage that I remember was the loss of a tall skinny pine in our front yard. It was laying across the road, blocking traffic. We also had fish in our yard, indicating that bay waters had risen a bit.

Because of damage around the city and the use of schools as shelters, we were out of school for almost two weeks.

Now that I think about it, maybe that is what I liked best about hurricanes: missing school.

One more week at work! hoo-ah!

Updates! Updates! Updates!

Fresh new content for your viewing pleasure:
» In the gallery, pictures from New Year’s Eve (better late than never) and various pictures from January and February events including Mavs basketball, crazy faces from Zeke, and Saturday night’s makeover.
» More pics of Gracie on her page.
» New places to go in the “leave” section on the right menu bar.
» travels fixed so there is actually content on the page.
» me revised to reflect parakeet death over weekend.
» distractions updated for the first time since Christmas.
» New wild cam shots!
» In longish, a new and growing feature: life goals.

Yesterday was my site’s first birthday! Happy birthday leiascofield.com. We’ve come a long way, baby.

Lost another parakeet this weekend. And then there was one….

This was a weekend. Can’t yet call it good or bad. It was just a weekend.

I had promised Ob (short for Bob, as if that wasn’t short enough) that we would go out Friday night since it was his last night here after a week of training. Ob was my boss at the campus radio station back in Florida. We go all the way back to 1996. One of Ob’s co-workers wanted to go to the mall, so Ob, Kim (the co-worker), and I headed out to Grapevine Mills Mall in search of some presents for Kim’s son and mother. Did I mention I had a splitting headache? I did. I also had not eaten since lunch. It took forever to find the right gifts and I was in more and more pain by the minute. Finally, we left the mall and went to go get some dinner. The first restaurant we stopped at had a horrendous wait, so we went on to one of my favorite mexican establishments. We sat down at 9pm. At this point, I was so miserable, I hardly said a word. Kim gave me an 800mg ibuprofen, but it didn’t kick in for a couple of hours. After dinner, I dropped them back at their hotel and came home. When I got home, my headache was practically a migraine, complete with light sensitivity and all the pathetic-ness that comes with it. Weekend at this point = bad.

I turned off all the lights in my apartment and called a friend who I was really wanting to talk to. The ibuprofen kicked in and the conversation was wonderful, and by 1am my headache was gone and my mood significantly improved. Weekend = nothing but good potential.

Saturday was spent getting a search to work on a site with Microsoft Index Server. Denise and I plugged away at getting the site to work with the search and it is running smoothly now. Weekend = good.

Saturday night, Amanda and I met my friend Amy for dinner, then came back to my place where Amy (who is a make-up artist) gave us makeovers. Fun girlie times. You can see the results of mine in the home cam right now. Glamorous. Weekend = good.

Sunday I woke up with the same sore throat and headache I have woken up with every day for the past three weeks. I need to get my allergy medicine changed. The stuff I am on now worked fine for the winter when everything was dead, but now that it has warmed up a bit and things are starting to grow, I can’t make it through the day without a sinus headache. Weekend = heading downhill.

Ran errands and did some shopping Sunday afternoon. Moderate success at getting everything I wanted to done, but a bad sinus headache started to develop. I took some excedrin and my allergy medicine (which I had forgotten to take this morning – doh!) and tried unsuccessfully to take a nap. I only succeeded in feeling like a space cadet. Weekend = sliding down a slippery slope.

Went to youth group, where my headache started to lighten, but I began feeling more and more disconnected. Also got some bad news about a few of my kids. Weekend = suck suck suck.

Called up a friend and talked. Well, I shouldn’t say I talked. I wasn’t very talkative. I listened. But I felt much better for it. Weekend = saved.

I’m sure you don’t really care for this lengthy minute-by-minute recap of my weekend. What’s the point of all this? It’s amazing how a few moments with a friend can save an otherwise crappy weekend.

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