Drama queen

After the wild antics of puppyhood for the past year, everything has finally settled down into controlled chaos.  The dog, the man, and the woman have a daily routine, with slight variations dependent on different work obligations.  We all end the day, more or less happy, healthy, and clean-ish.

The only drama queen throwing a wrench into our household lately is the weather.  A few weeks ago, we were supposed to get the Storm To End All Storms when Bryan would conveniently be out of town at an all-inclusive resort for work.  During its reign of terror and mayhem, North Texans were forecasted to get softball-sized hail, tornado touchdowns, and flooding everywhere.  Before Bryan left, he prepared our back patio, which meant gathering up all the outdoor cushions and moving them inside the house, shifting the patio furniture clearly under the awning, and making enough room under our covered patio to park my car as well. 

To park under said awning, one has to pull into the alley behind our house.  As all of the houses in the neighborhood have front driveways as well, the only people who use said alley are the garbage and recycling service vehicles, whose heavy duty trucks have left unmaintained pits of despair to rival any pothole I’ve seen in the north.  These holes have expanded over time and during a rainstorm, it turns the back alley into a creek.

Bryan went and filled in the potholes leading from the alley entrance to our back driveway so that my lowrider vehicle wouldn’t bottom out as I pulled around the evening of the storm.  In picking up gravel and random chunks of concrete to fill these holes, he caught himself in the face with a piece of street and scraped up his chin, proudly showing me the bleeding wound later as evidence of his efforts.

I can’t tell you how happy he was when I reported that I successfully drove through the alley and parked behind the house without scraping up the undercarriage of my car.  That night, Bowie and I sat in wait for the storm, me with mild anxiety that we’d be replacing a roof and maybe a few windows and him confused as to why all the outdoor stuff was inside.  At 11 pm, I heard a few raindrops start to hit the roof and thought - this is it - and rolled over and went back to sleep.

Not at all what happened - Unsplash

Turns out, that was about all the weather we saw The Night of the Storm.  A few raindrops, no hail, no tornado, no flooding.  All that fuss and prep for a great big nothing.  I’m not complaining about not having hail damage to the house.  The local weatherman is already catching enough grief from everyone around the metroplex for being the boy who cried wolf.  And Bryan was a little miffed that he took it on the chin for what ended up being a dramatic disappointment. 

This week, we had two tornadoes touch down in north Texas.  Neither of us parked under the awning.  “Maybe if we ignore her temper tantrums, she’ll eventually just go away” is how we’re treating the drama queen Texas spring weather of 2019.