The blog has once again fallen into disarray. I’ve been borderline busy covering hurricanes in various cities for the past two weeks. These hurricanes have not been particularly funny, leaving me few options to write light-hearted musings about the world today.

At the risk of feeling ways about stuff, a professor in college once showed us a video of a reporter asking a woman who’d just found out her husband had died in a plane how she feels.

“How do you think it feels!?” she answered.

I feel like that’s what I was doing in Houston and Tampa. I had learned from that video, though, not to be intrusive. If you’re standing there with a microphone, sometimes people walk up to you because they’ve got something they need to say. If you’re not insipid and display some compassion, you can give people a sounding a board, a way for them to get their feelings out and feel better, if only for a few minutes.

So there I am planning to take the high road in Florida, and the Lord shows up. He says to me, He says, “I’ll show you.” And he pulls the fire alarm at my hotel at 2 am one morning, and the hotel serves wine.

Then He’s all, the Lord’s all, “These people have been through enough. Let’s make them laugh again.”

So He shoves in front of me:

1.) A guy who was out shopping in Corpus Christi before Harvey and explains the rush on alcohol.

2.) A guy in Fort Myers, Florida who, quite reasonably, couldn’t understand why he lost power in Hurricane Irma even though he lives on Edison Avenue.

Let’s start in Houston, though:

​During Harvey, or, I should say, right before Harvey, hail stones blew through both windows on the driver’s side of the news car as part of the Lord’s effort to get me fired.

At the time, I was talking to a colleague on the phone, who would later recount that he heard glass breaking, then I declared, “[expletive]! I gotta go.”

The nearest place I could get the window fixed was a couple hours away in San Antonio, so I drove down I-37 with the windows down and my hood up like a Nueces County street tough. Now that I think of it, though, a Nueces County street tough probably wouldn’t have taken the time to pull into a rest area to take a selfie. He would, however, absolutely refer to himself as a Nueces County street tough.

In Florida, I had made plans to stay at a hotel in Orlando. We all agreed that’d be safe from the storm and give me easy access to Miami, Jacksonville or Tampa, so I could drive wherever people were made to feel the most powerless against the forces of the universe.

Closer to the storm, though, it was clear Tampa was the place to be. I found the hotel where media and some first responders were staying.

​There, the chef was cooking unusually elaborate meals. He said his wife and kid were with him in the hotel and that gave him something to do other than worry about his house and family.

Some of the food might have gone to waste otherwise. The lobster mac and cheese was a solid hurricane ration. I highly recommend it to the Red Cross.

Really, though, it was just nice to get a break from the giant sack of trail mix I had in the car.