We ain't afraid of no stinking hurricanes

Many years ago I lived in Orlando, FL. Myself and three other idiots packed up our shit a week after high school graduation and drove off to the land of sun and fun, from Michigan. The sum total thoughts on the whole adventure were something like, "beer, bikinis, beach". We decided to take the coast down instead of I-75 straight down. Why, I don't know. Most of the drive was completed in the dark, we only stopped for gas and nobody had any particular place they wanted to visit. Such is the folly of youth.

The only things I remember of the drive are driving through DC at four in the morning and deciding where exactly in Florida we were going to live. That's right, when we left only the state had been nailed down. Fortunately, the buzz had worn off before we started in on where we wanted to live. Cooler heads prevailed and we decided that living on the beach might hamper our efforts to find and keep a job, so we decided on Orlando, which looked to be about an hour from Daytona Beach on our map. We drove straight to Daytona, first, arriving after dark and went for a midnight swim to end the road trip.

The next day, we found ourselves in Orlando, snagged an apartment and settled in. We even found work and kept our jobs, only raiding the bikinis at Daytona on the weekends and limiting our time in the Booby Trap (Famous strip joint shaped like two boobs, two blocks from our apartment. Really.) to Monday, Tuesday and Thursday nights. So many weird and wonderful things happened to us the two years we lived there, that I can't even begin to explain. Anyway, this post isn't about our time in Orlando. However, before I discontinue my digression, I feel compelled to tell you that while living there I saw a UFO, or actually many UFO's, one night. I was joined by about 25 other people-most of them sober, so it wasn't the contact buzz from my toluene-huffing next-door neighbor, the mushrooms I ate that night, or the killer Thai stick I burned by the bale. It was one of my house mates' birthday that night, but his appendix was bursting so we left him puking in the bathroom while we got shit-faced. He missed seeing UFO's on his birthday-the poor bastard.

No, the reason I brought up Orlando is that one day after working all night, I passed out back at home and slept soundly as a tornado ripped down my street, passing right by me and destroying literally everything but our apartment block. My house mates, finding me passed out in front of a window displaying total carnage assumed I had been caught out in the monster, injured and then somehow crawled back inside to die. I awoke to a bunch of really terrified faces. I don't think to this day they really believe I just slept through it and I admit it was hard to believe as I walked down the street that day, looking at smashed buildings, then looking back at the window I had just been sleeping in front of. Kind of unreal.

I've never been known as a heavy sleeper, but there you go.

So last night I hit the rack, snooze all night, accompanied by freaky, vivid dreams supplied by my nicotine patch and wake to find I just slept through a hurricane. Yes, hurricane Humberto just passed us in the night like....like something passing us in the night. Granted he was only a category one, but I slept right through a freaking hurricane, in a very small ship. They tell me it got rough last night and my cabin and head are testament to the violence. Everything not tied down was strewn around the room, except for a package of toilet paper that had been sitting in the porthole above the toilet. It was nestled in the toilet, as if it was trying to get to it's final destination, bypassing what must be a somewhat bad experience for anybody, that is, except for the brown-nosing motherfucker next to me.

And finally, I believe that brings my total to ten of these bastards. Oh yeah, Honey, in case you heard about Humberto, I guess I'm fine and we're already back working. I've got my rough weather headache, but that's it. Weird, huh?

p.s. The tornado did not destroy the Booby Trap, in case anyone's worried. I even found it on Google Earth a few months back and they're still standing proud, though it looked like it was kind of cold...