NICE HABOOBS, EH?

So.  It's Wednesday.  Night.  A lot of people have been blogging about last night's dust storm in Phoenix.  So.  It's a dust storm.  We live in the desert.  In the monsoon season, as I've been trying to tell you guys, the wind changes direction and it blows.  Sometimes it picks up sand and dirt from the few open spaces we have left and it forms a huge cloud which is what we call a haboob.  It's an Arabic word.  But we got it and it's ours now.  So the dust blows in and nobody gets hurt.  Except, maybe, some of those newcomers from Chicago.  Other than that, the swimming pools get full of mud, the dust covers your cars, and it's gone.  In spite of the rather spectacular pictures, it's no big deal.  Life goes on.

O.K.  Enough with the dust storm.

Up here in the mountains, we don't get dust storms.  We get rain.  Sometimes a little.  Sometimes a lot.  Sometimes the dry washes around here get hit with a ton of water and sometimes some dumbass drives into it and gets swept away and, if he's not real lucky, he dies.  But that happens everywhere, folks.  If you're dumb enough to risk your life with weather phenomenons, you can lose your life.

I lived for many years in North Dakota.  They get blizzards there.  Sometimes people would try to drive through them.  (O.K.  Personal note here.  I drove through one for about 300 miles the night my son was born.  When I got there, he was perhaps 6 hours old.  So why did I do it?  Stupidity.)  Anyway, sometimes they get through, sometimes they don't.

I also lived in Indiana for awhile.  Occasionally they had tornadoes there.  I can remember one Easter Sunday when one came within, oh, maybe a mile, maybe a half mile of where we lived.  We got out, took our "stuff" and drove in an opposite direction.  Later, we drove to where the tornado had touched down and witnessed massive destruction.

So what am I trying to say here?  Don't be afraid of weather but don't tempt it either.  You get a big dust storm?  Stay in your house.  Close the windows.  It's only going to last for a short time and then you clean up the mess.  No big deal.

You hear me?  NO.  BIG.  DEAL.