Mayhem

With the nuns, the weather, and lots of problems with mechanical devices, things have been utter chaos at camp this week.

Actually, so far the nuns haven't been contributing to the chaos too much. They've provided some comic relief, though. As Shorty would say, "You haven't truly lived till you've seen a nun wrestle a rubber chicken out of a junior high girl's hands."

True story.

The mechanical devices have caused a bit of pain for coworkers, but that's not quite what I want to discuss right now.

I'm sorry. That leaves the weather.

In my defense, we had a crazy weekend. Friday night brought a fairly short but fierce storm to the area, including softball-sized hail. We were lucky -- we managed to get all of our vehicles hidden under carports and in garages, and then it skirted us. Others were less fortunate. The bossman's wife and all sorts of her coworkers lost windshields (and worse) at the hospital. Windows in southeast Rapid were destroyed. Dents were deep and trees were stripped.

It was ugly.

Naturally, this made us all a bit more skittish on Saturday when the next storm rolled through.

Saturday was my day off. I spent the early afternoon kayaking, and then Shorty and I and two of our cohorts headed for the Black Hills Maze for some general entertainment. We were about halfway through when we started to see the clouds gathering south of us, right in our path home.

We finished the second half much more quickly and stood and chatted with the people working there for a minute. They had been hit the night before -- one had lost his windshield, the other her rear window -- and neither Shorty nor I were in a terrible rush to drive through this new mess to get back to Storm. A call to the camp told us that our compatriots' cars weren't in danger ... and we decided to head further into town.

After striking out a couple of times, we ended up at Sonic -- the only place in town where we could park under an awning and take up space without angering anyone. Especially since that also meant a round of Limeades to justify our presence.

And then ... we watched it rain.

And the power go out across the street. Twice.

And the hail fall.

And we were relieved to be where we were.

(PS -- Is it just me, or is Tiger Woods looking more and more scuzzy?)