Well, ha ha, ten days later.

Fay turned out to be, for us, the storm that wasn't. We were right in the path for a while but we ended up getting the usual amount of rain that we get every day in the rainy season, maybe just a bit more wind than usual. It's pretty breezy right now, in fact. One of the many things I like about living here is that after the sun goes down the temperature drops, there's a breeze, and you might want sleeves even in August. I keep a sweater handy for my evening stroll. I do feel for the people east of us who are being flooded out of their homes. A spectacular amount of rainfall will do that. When F and I came here last year to find a place to live we were very conscious of wanting whatever high ground there was, and we have it.

And she cracked me up on Tuesday afternoon, calling to check up on us. She gets jittery not being here to look after us, because we probably won't have any better sense than to run out to look at the hurricane - "I've never seen a hurricane before!" she imagined me saying in a ditzy voice - and have a tree fall on us, or something. But I have, I've seen what there was of Camille when it swept through north Mississippi when I was a girl, and I think we got some stormy weather when the remnants of Katrina blew through. And Hurricane Elvis, of course, which was bad news. No fun at all.

Eventually I will stop talking about myself, but here's some more stuff. I stopped Ultram on the weekend. I was on it for 3 months and that's possibly long enough to get a little used to it. Major insomnia. So I added another herb last night (Valerian) and it made all the difference in the world. Will do the same tonight. Before long I should be re-adjusted. I feel not having Ultram in that my shoulder is griping at me more, and more often, but it's nothing like it was three months ago. I'm very hopeful of getting past this, maybe completely by the end of the year.

Work has been pretty busy. We're trying some things to get the plant back up and running and back to the usual 30 or so employees. I've called back another tech to help with that. Kind of miss being by myself in the lab, but I knew it couldn't last.