Lured, Out of the Lair

Hick spent Thursday morning in the BARn, rebuilding 60 fishing lures. That's his estimate. Most of them were given to him by one of his storage unit buddies, who doesn't deal in fishing equipment. They do stuff like that, Hick's junking cronies. Buy things at auctions that they know somebody else sells, then trade off items. A bargain is a bargain.

I abandoned my dark basement lair to do my weekly errands a day early, at my leisure, so I wouldn't have to rush to the main post office Friday morning by the crack of 11:30. It was cloudy and getting cloudier when I sent Hick a text around 10:45. He doesn't always receive them in the BARn, perhaps due to all the junk piled around, blocking the signal, or the metal roof. He didn't answer right away, but 20 minutes later, responded with:

"I get messages when I go out to pee"

TMI, perhaps. Hick agrees with Jeff Goldblum in The Big Chill: "That's the great thing about the outdoors, it's one giant toilet."

Anyhoo...I determined that I didn't need a jacket, and left for town. I made a stop at the cemetery, since I missed last week due to a funeral in progress. While there, the wind started kicking up. No rain, though.

At 12:49, I got another text from Hick:

"Be careful weather looks nasty"

"Saw black clouds in my mirror. Okay here at the post office."

I figured Hick was sitting in the La-Z-Boy, having leftover BBQ hot dogs, looking out the front window. Perhaps he had a twinge of conscience for all those times I'm pretty sure he was trying to kill me. Like Sunday afternoon, when he grilled those hot dogs, spilled them on the back porch where I give the dogs their treats, and then said, "We can still eat them!"

Anyhoo...I made it through my errands with only a spatter of large raindrops as I returned to T-Hoe after paying for gas. The rest of my trip was uneventful. The dark clouds moved around to the south. Not a bad day at all, just overcast, and 55 degrees.

The state highway department was directing traffic on the lettered highway, just past my turn at the blacktop county road. They were picking up a bunch of trees they had trimmed earlier in the week. About a half mile deeper into nowhere, I noticed branches and broken limbs on the county road.

"Huh. They sure are messy. Unless this is from the new owner trimming trees by the sheep guy's house."

The deeper I went into nowhere, the more limbs I saw on the road. Huh. Surely they wouldn't have driven their truck this way.

There were even errant sticks all over our gravel road. I was starting to think maybe a storm had passed through. I made a mental note to ask Hick when I got home.

Well. There was my answer without a consultHICKtation.

That's not where the dumpster belongs! It goes by the post behind the Gator. The dumpster has blown over on a couple occasions, right where it stood, but never sailed 40 feet away!

The boys' basketball goal has never blown over, either! Hick has gone out to lay it down on occasion, when we were in a tornado path. He had trouble pushing it back in place when he came out to set it up. The bottom if full of sand.

Here's my little Jack, licking his nose, coming to greet me.

Jack probably rode out the non-storm under SilverRedO, while Juno shook with fear in her house on the back porch, out of the wind.

Hick said he hadn't noticed any storm or excessive wind. Only the black clouds. We were under a tornado watch until 11:00 p.m.