Hellbent

It has been raining pretty steadily since yesterday afternoon, perhaps even earlier; I only noticed around one o’clock. It was pouring when I drove home yesterday–I got soaked walking to my car from the office and then again getting from the car to the Lost Apartment. I decided not to walk to the gym in the pouring rain during a flash flood advisory–there were two yesterday, from 1-4 an then again from 6-10–and last night’s rain came from some intense thunderstorms; some of the longest peals of thunder I can recall. It’s still raining this morning–everything I can see outside my windows is slick and wet–which means getting to work this morning will be interesting, to say the least. No one in New Orleans knows how to drive in rain, which amuses and irritates me at the same time. How can you live in a city where it rains as much as New Orleans (let alone floods) and not know how to drive in rain? It would be like living in Minneapolis and not knowing how to drive in snow…although every day it rains I am grateful I learned how to drive in a state that has seasons, so I learned how to drive in all weather conditions.

I managed to get a lot done yesterday–made some serious progress on the inbox, if not enough on my book–and did a lot of picking up and straightening up around the Lost Apartment. I started watching a Netflix documentary series, The Lost Pirate Kingdom, which is a non-fiction historical account of the Bahamas/Nassau piracy community (which was also fictionally depicted in Black Sails, still a favorite show of mine and one that hasn’t achieved nearly the attention and praise and audience it deserved), and it was very interesting. I did start futzing around with my iPad during the second episode, which I finally turned off when I realized I wasn’t really paying as much attention as I should, so I will probably come back to the series and rewatch episode two at some point. I’ve always wanted to write a gay pirate adventure set in the early eighteenth century (whoa! That was some major lightning, and the thunder lasted nearly thirty seconds….it’s still dying off now)…it was swirling around in my head again last night while I watched The Lost Pirate Kingdom, and scribbling down notes and ideas was what originally led to my distraction during the second episode. I also made a note to reread The Deep by Peter Benchley; I reread it again a few years ago and wasn’t as impressed with it as I had been when I first read it back in the 1970’s.

I just checked the weather and we are in a flash flood advisory thru Thursday; heavy heaving sigh. New Orleans floods whenever we get a lot of heavy rain in a short period of time (tropical climate, remember?) and it’s always enervating; you have to worry about your car being parked in the right place and hope you don’t have to cross through any deep water on your way to work and so forth, not to mention hope nobody is driving like an idiot (and in New Orleans, you encounter that in the best of weather and driving conditions). Heavy sigh. It’s also going to be weird at work–heavy weather usually means a lot of cancellations and no-shows on our schedule, plus wondering if the city is flooding…

At least tomorrow I am working from home. I can make condom packs or do data entry while cuddled up under a blanket in either the bed or my easy chair while listening to the rain…how comfortable would that be? I certainly didn’t want to get out of the bed this morning. There’s just something so…snug and comfortable about being underneath blankets while it rains outside…I should probably go to the gym tonight, depending on how hard it’s raining, I suppose. It was pouring yesterday and continued to pour, which was why I decided not to go–not to mention the walk there would take me through low-lying areas that often flood during rains like we were having last night (this morning it doesn’t seem so bad–overcast with thunder and lightning, of course, but the rain isn’t coming down like someone opened a spigot, the way it usually does when it pours here.

And of course this weekend is the World Figure Skating Championships! Woo-hoo!

And on that note, it’s back to the spice mines.