Holy crap!

I'm a smoker. I can count the number of times I've interacted with smokeless tobacco on hand and have several fingers left over.

However, if I had any confidence that this sign was anything but an odd arrangement of words, I'd buy stock in Copenhagen



I mean, c'mon. How cool would that be?

Sign courtesy of one of the fine gas stations of Wayland, Michigan.

What happens in northern Tennessee...

I'm 720 miles from home, rolling around in a motel bed with a handsome black guy. The downside, of course, is that he's neutered, has a tail, and requires frequent reminders that there's no ass-licking on the bed.

I'm well past the halfway point, which always makes me happy. I added about 50 miles to my trip by refusing to drive in either Oklahoma (which has been trying to kill me with its weather for about eight years now) or Illinois (because I don't think there's any way on earth to make my Jeep groovy with their firearms transport laws, and their gas is expensive).

I did the always-fun search for the rattiest available motel, and found one that didn't care if I wanted to bring a donkey into my room if I didn't mind paying the $5 pet fee.

Average mileage per gallon over the first 557.5 miles of travel was 17.17, which isn't bad considering I'm around 3000 rpm at 73 mph (my preferred speed of travel). I probably lost some off that average battling the wind on the last leg, but I won't have the numbers until I fill up in the morning. Unleaded regular ran me an average of $3.292/gallon, but two of the three fillups were in Arkansas, so that number is going nowhere but up.

It's late, and one of us has been pretty nervous, so he probably needs one more "out" before we call it a night.

Weather

I do not normally wake up for bad weather. But a band of storms came through last night that had me catapulting out of bed around 0330.

All is well here, but I did note one thing... I got up, peered out the windows, muttered "Holy shit...." Then I heard some sirens start up.

I was farily sure that meant something bad, but I figured it was possible they were sounding because it was
A - a severe thunderstorm warning
B - a tornado warning
C - a flash flood warning (there are several "low spots" in our immediate area)

Satellite TV is about as useful as a screen door on a submarine in heavy rain, so I hit a local news website to find out what the story was. That proved entirely useless, offering some random imagery of a band of heavy weather, and NO INFORMATION on warnings or watches.

Fortunately, weather.com is always there for me, and as soon as I entered my ZIP code, let me know that we were under just about every sort of warning one gets in Texas, tornado included.

Seeing as we don't have a basement and neither of us felt like hiding in the closet, I went back to bed and to sleep at that point. But it was nice to know. Cheers for weather.com, and a big boo-hiss to nbc51.

Incidentally, there was more heavy weather out there last night. I'm taking off on a road trip today, and the other end of the evil weather was in the county next to my destination.

Could be a fun drive.

Note to self:

The day after running an Army physical fitness test may not be the best day to get range time. Because it's awfully hard to hold a pistol at arm's length for any length of time when one has spaghetti arms as a result of pushups.

[sigh]

We're off for a couple days of fishing. The laptop is coming along in case there's internet access.

Woo-hoo!

27 days on orders for the Wart Yolk evolution, followed by a regular weekend drill. That's 29 days of early mornings and uniforms.

So this evening, I'm watching a Star Wars marathon with the Mister and catching up on some of the beer I haven't been drinking when I've needed to be present and coherent before sunrise.

Extra bonus for tonight - a quick shot of the infamous "Wire Moment," or, at least, the aftermath a few hours later. Not so bad, really.