Bloody Weather

Do you know what I miss most about regular, twice-daily meetings of the 3-Martini Break Group? Well, I'm going to tell you.

It was so educational. Billy will agree with me, having only yesterday been exposed to such phrases as "tramp stamp" and "bullseye" for a lady's lower-back tattoo. Me, I just learned what a "shocker" is, yesterday, from Diane. I can't tell you what it is, because my parents are reading; but I was quite shocked (haha!) to discover that Thomas was already familiar with the term. And I thought he was so nice!

It was also from my time in the 3MBG that I learned about crop-dusting, a deplorable practice familiar to many of my friends but never, I hasten to add, known to me in any but the most hypothetical, or at least purely accidental context.

My parents had never heard a more innocent phrase I introduced a couple of years ago, when I mentioned that a clubgoer in a bar my stepsiblings and I visited looked as if she had been "rode hard and put away wet." I didn't get that one from a 3MBG member - why, I've known that phrase for a coon's age - but I was certainly doing my 3MBGly ("threm-BIG-ly") duty in passing the information along to the uninitiated.

Of course, if there's one topic the 3MBG knows more about than practically anyone else in the world, it's the weather, and I'm no exception, especially now I'm in my current job. Any one of us could step up and be a meteorologist. We'd all look quite fetching in front of a greenscreen. I probably need to work on my "push the weather system away" move, but otherwise, I've got it down. So it was with no small degree of authority that I informed Robbie this evening that a weather system, bidding fair to become Tropical Storm Ana, is loafing around near the Yucatan Peninsula - not yet doing anything criminal, just shouting insolent remarks at passing ships, and threatening to spray-paint gang tags on the coast.

"And what hurricane," Robbie asks, "comes after Ana?"

"I don't remember," I said.

We agreed that the next named storm after Ana will probably draw a bead on the Texas coast, moving purposefully towards it, yet never actually make landfall, eventually coldly informing the bewildered coast that it wants no contact of any kind. "Or it will call up at the last moment and say something came up and it can't make it," added Robbie.

"Nonono," I said, "that'd be Hurricane Greg."

Tony gets his own hurricane in - I don't remember which year without looking it up. That'll be a big beefy one. Hurricane Billy would carefully avoid damaging environmentally sensitive areas, ranches and farms, but would completely wipe out every Wal-Mart in the state. "And Hurricane Beth will have two big, beautiful - eyes," says Robbie, who can be pretty smarmy when he wants to be.

I'm glad to have good friends who teach me more than I ever wanted to know. How else would I manage to put up with this miserable weather?