Three stuff day today, by which I mean three different events going on:

(a) Dixon Scottish Games, which I went to early and then left early. Last year it was boiling hot, this year it was very chilly and cold and I wished I wasn’t wearing a kilt and the leggings underneath were not enough. My favorite Celtic band wasn’t there and the food was terrible, and even though I was still enjoying watching guys throw heavy weights around (I think that is the selling point for this one particularly), I decided to leave around noon and get better food and put on pants.

While there, I got texts from Robert wanting a ride because Jean got sick and then finding out that Brian got the last ticket (huzzah!) and also wanted a ride.

(b) I then went to a storytelling workshop put on by Gloria, who I was in the show with at this theater (Celebration Arts) last year. She and her presenting partner did a good job. Gloria covered the “how to write it” and “getting ideas” section and gave us a prompt: “They found the dog.”

This reminded me of the whole lost cat story recently, so I wrote that up and was happy with it. I dunno if I’d tell a story that is straight up about praying to saints in every audience, but I enjoyed it and it’s short, so that works for most gigs. I then went up there and did it and got critiques along the lines of “you’re too fast” (the usual) and “don’t use your hands unless you are acting out praying or looking at posters.” Gloria’s husband also told me about a useful app to download.

One lady, inspired by mine, told a story about when she lived here in college and lost her dog and they put up posters and a crazy dog lady found their dog and was giving them all kinds of shit and asking why the dog ran away and saying she wanted proof the dog was in a good home (according to this lady, it really wasn’t) and if she found the dog again she’d keep it.... Then when this lady went over to the woman’s house, she had like 80 dogs and the lost dog was now 10 pounds heavier because she kept feeding it bacon.

While at this one, I got more texts along the lines of “are we dressing up for this?” from Robert, and I was all “probably but I don’t know what to wear if it’s gonna be cold tonight” and Cameron was pretty much all “duh,” followed by “hey, can I get a ride?”

(c) After figuring out what to wear...”hey, anyone see that it’s raining?” Cameron mentioned on ye olde group text. I looked outside. It wasn’t raining here. She lives in Woodland and it was pouring, thundering and lightning was going off. I looked at weather.com and my response to this was “fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck. Weather report says HAIL?!”

Seriously, I’d checked earlier in the weekend and it had said “slight shower in the morning,” which did not happen. Now there’s supposed to be HAIL?!? Cameron said it was hailing there.

My response to this was “That’s it, the fucking chaos magnet I’ve had going off for weeks needs to stop now.” Now, did I cause sudden bad weather? No or at least probably not, but I can’t help but suspect that my volunteering to carpool people suddenly jinxed things because I am already terrified of driving in rain as is and even though I have a new car and presumably it won’t do the steaming up/windshield wipers not working shenanigans the old one did, I’d really rather not fuck up driving in the first time and kill my friends (and I actually texted such). Because even if it was dry here now, I bet the second I had the car on and was hitting the freeway, the rain would start. I was also like “that’s it, never planning a carpool again.”* Really, this is September, the insane driving rain shit shouldn’t be starting until after the time change in November.** This makes no sense.

* See below.
** Fucking global warming.

Cameron didn’t feel like her car could manage in this level of weather shit, so I suspect we all assumed Scott would go pick her up, and we were right. Meanwhile, Robert and Brian got to my place and as we were all standing around watching the dryness, Brian and I got weather alerts saying TORNADO ALERT UNTIL SEVEN.

WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK?!?!?!??!?!?!?

TORNADOS HERE?!?!

Yes, here. Really. That happened. Scott saw it, he reported later. I also heard from my neighbor Cathy that she saw it on the other end of town. The guys and I went into my place and turned on the news and they were announcing that people were CANOEING in the streets of Woodland and there was tons of hail. So much hail it looked like snow.

(Meanwhile, I guess Janene was home killing zombies in a game rather than going to this show. Huh. This was sounding more and more prudent.)

Luckily for us, they called off the tornado alert by seven, it never did start raining here as long as we were here (though we did get a rainbow), and my neighbors decided to start partying. There was much frantic texting among everyone. Brian checked on Original Blonde Sarah, who was closer to the venue than we were. I texted Mark and he said the theater would start the show late and if we were late, they’d still seat us and there’s not that much going on at the start anyway and if the weather was really bad we could stay at his house (yesssss, I said back). Scott and Cameron arrived around 7:30 and we all elected that Scott’s car was probably best for dealing with this weather. He said he’d seen the tornado and a lot of mist but no actual rain at the time. And it was still quite dry until we hit Sacramento, at which point it started pouring. He seemed unfazed, I was quietly wigging but trying not to wig so much publicly as I normally do during awful rain times.

I remember that we discussed the idea of a “do over prom” party from Thursday and who went to prom (not most of them) and who did (I have no issues with asking anyone to prom.... well, we’ll see if/when this party idea happens if that comes up).I did end up telling folks the lost cat story from today, though, which is kind of a weird one, and the weird off and on religiosity of my mom and dad, and generally going on about chaos magneting and how it’s really been going off the last few weeks but most of it was like, happy and benign except for the fan fire, and oh, now THIS. I even told most of the my car decided to change from Yacht Rock to the Love station on its own story, though not mentioning what song it changed it to (too much). To which Scott was all, yeah, my parents listen to yacht rock. So someone’s heard of it before, anyway.

Fair warning given, I suppose, on my weirdness levels. This shall be uh, interesting if/when he gets to hear and/or experience this shit for himself, I suppose.

We also all elected that Scott should do all carpools from now on, under the circumstances.

We got there around 8:20ish (I was amused that everyone started noticing that Old Town is cute and I was all, see, that’s why I said we should hang out here, not that that would have gone well today, and look, there’s a game store!) and we only missed the first song number and the theater folks were very nice about it. Mark also gave the theater folks $10 for us to get treats on him. What a sweetie.

As for the show itself: I didn’t know much about it beyond “killer plant plot” and “Robert and Janene did “Suddenly Seymour” at karaoke this week” and “I vaguely remember seeing the Jack Nicholson old black and white movie but all I remember of it was Jack Nicholson.” Robert said they have different versions of the ending and we got the very unhappy ending that reminded me of of Cabin in the Woods. Oh my. I also kind of freaked out finding out that Audrey was in a straight up abusive relationship with a dentist and was bugging out and freaking inside during those scenes. I was also reminded of going to Burning Man when the dentist was huffing nitrous.* Mark was doing a good job in his part as Mr. Mushnik, though. We talked to him afterwards and he said that even though this is his favorite musical, he can’t wait to shave off his goatee and get rid of the fat suit he had on, and also he thinks acting might be palling for him after this one and he wants to direct**. Or maybe he’s just tired because he was doing double shows that they added on. I asked him, “So, what’s it like to be eaten by a plant?” and he said, “I never get it right,” because he never knows when the plant is going to chomp down on him.

* As I told everyone during intermission, the camp I was in was called “Crackutopia” and their “thing” was to build a pyramid, hang people by their feet and spin them around while on nitrous. “I had nothing whatsoever to do with that.”
** “Dude, if I ever write that 10 minute play I’ll put you down as the director,” I said.

We discussed other field trippy activities, because Scott was intrigued that this theater is going to do Evil Dead (“The splash zone is the first three rows.” “Shouldn’t it be the entire theater?”), there’s the Rocky Horror show that Original Blonde Sarah is going to be in, and when to do the next escape room, presumably on a Sunday. We shall see after they are all out of the current play.

It was totally dry by the time we left, so everything was fine weatherwise. Whew. Nobody died. Whew. We even made it to the show. Whew.

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