Gordaen’s Blog

I recently took a trip away from my home state (the always rainy Washington) to The South where it is always sunny…. Two days after arriving, it rained more in one day than it does in Seattle in July and August put together. The official weather claims were a bit over two inches, but a large pot that had been left outside filled above 4 inches twice during the night. Noah would have been telling people, “I told you so,” if he had been around.

The power only went out for a few hours, so it was not too bad. Plus, there was no longer any need to walk 1/4 mile to the beach for swimming—I could swim in the yard! The excessive rain flooded yards and roads alike, but that did not prevent people from driving through it, creating rooster tails higher than their vehicles. Some people even drove golf carts through the “puddles.” I opted to stay on the covered deck.

Fortunately, a getaway boat was just a short swim away. The rain did eventually stop… and then it started again. When power did return, I had the joy of killing a cockroach in the bedroom I was going to be staying in. Some people tried to call it a “water bug,” but it did not look like the Google Image results for water bug. Besides, the name of it didn’t really matter. I was preprogrammed to get the heebie jeebies from seeing the nasty thing. I managed to kill it with a very solid hit from my sandals, but the nasty bug barely cracked. I guess the 2+ inch monster had some serious body armor. Sleeping with the light on became mandatory.

The cockroaches (yes, plural) that I saw were just some of the exotic wild life I encountered. There were also sharks, a sting ray, and a monster of a spider. It was pretty dark when I took the photo of the spider, but it didn’t seem bothered by my use of the camera’s flash (at least not as bothered as it was by the Cheetos someone had put in its web). The spider was so large and distracting, it wasn’t until I was preparing the photo for this blog that I realized there was another spider just above it in the photo and perhaps more in the large web that I hadn’t noticed.

Okay, okay, so despite my love of sarcasm and how terrible circumstances can make the most interesting blog posts, I did manage to take a few photos that you might actually want to see: