Howling for You

As far as I remember, song titles are not copyrighted so I can admit I stole the above title from the Black Keys, a band I'm getting into these days. If the Black Keys or their attorney feel differently, I'll be happy to change the title of this post. Okay. That's it for writing humor at the moment. The howling I did was in pain beyond what I was prepared to accept.

Melissa bowed to my hoarder's instincts and brought out her bottle of Amaretto. She poured me a shot in a little glass since I asked her not to use a shot glass. There was no way I was ever going to gulp down a shot of anything again but it mattered with the way my hands were shaking. The good stuff burned just a little but tasted very good. More importantly, it took the edge off my pain. When it came back, I had more warning so a cup of herbal tea helped this time.

By bedtime, I was so exhausted that I fell asleep in bed. That's not something I can do ordinarily but pain is tiring. Unlike the beer, the Amaretto doesn't have to be cold to taste good which would be useful in case of power loss. I got up this morning and read some bad news from a dear acquaintance in PA. This reminded me that some things are worse than pain. I don't have her permission to use her name but she'll know who I'm writing about if she were to read this.

By the time I finished reading, I was feeling a wreck like I was in medicine withdrawal and I realized I hadn't taken my breakfast meds yet. As a normal day sleeper, it isn't unusual for me to take my breakfast meds around 5 PM or so. It was around 2 PM and I wasn't ready to go back to sleep. I took my meds, of course. Then I decided that, if we were going to lose power, I was going to use our modern conveniences while we still had them. I drank some K-cup brewed tea and put on my "overshirt." Between the herbs and the sweat, my meds took effect quickly enough.

I've been hearing reports of power outages moving this way so I better wrap this up. There was what I hope is a great typo on weather.com and not the truth. A headline read that Sussex County was being evacuated including all 25,000 people. There are reasons why this is almost plausible and why it strikes me as absurd. First of all, Sussex is flat and sparsely populated. I joke about it being "Slower Delaware" with the country music and the farms. Still, I'm pretty sure more than 25,000 people live there. If that many people are being evacuated, I wish them well. I'm pretty sure there have to be towns of that size somewhere in Sussex. The rural, slow stuff is less true every year.

The storm hasn't made landfall yet so there is more pain to come. We'll be in a little trouble if we lose power but only if that includes gas. (We're cookin' with gas.) I know what to sniff for in case of a leak which I think is the only issue.