Last night was interesting. We went to bed after finishing storm prep, including a tarp to help with rain and dust. I was working on the blog post and Wesley was playing a game on his phone. Then he was looking out the windows to be sure his tarp was still in place. The next thing I knew he was heading outside to fix the tarp. The wind was blowing so hard that it ripped the grommets right out of the tarp so that the stakes couldn’t hold it in the ground anymore. By morning the only thing still attached to the ground was on the back of the tent. As we were laying in bed doing things on our phones, we had a flip to our side because when we laid on our back we were getting lots of dirt in our eyes. That didn’t change all night long. The tarp was snapping in the wind in making a ton of noise. The good news is the tent is still standing, but the bad news is that everything inside of it is completely covered in dirt because our tent has floor vents in addition to the venting underneath the rain fly. I think most of the dirt was blowing in from the floor vents.
Once I got up and moving today, I started on laundry that I didn’t finish from yesterday last night because I assumed it would get rained on. That was the correct assessment so I’m glad that I made that decision Bc not only would it have gotten rained on, but dust coated. The problem was our metal drying rack could not take the weight of the clothing, towels, and sheets in addition to the wind so it is now misshapen and definitely not my friend anymore. Anything that whacks me in the head is not my friend anymore. I was really afraid that could end up being concussion number 10. I’m making some silly mistakes tonight so maybe it is a slight head injury. I had an epic meltdown trying to do laundry in the wind. There was cussing, screaming, and crying. Wesley finally fired me from laundry for the day and took it over. There was so much because all of the bedding was covered in dirt. Our mentor told me to be sure to stay on top of that bc these kinds of storms often stir up cyano, which I knew already bc all of my joints hurt through the night and this morning. I never bothered decontaminating bc it didn’t seem like it would help. That was dumb and I should have done it, but my freshly cleaned hair from the night before was full of dirt. My eye boogers and normal boogers all were brown.
I decided to catch up on cleaning the truck being I had the truck present and some extra time being I was no longer allowed to do laundry. While I was cleaning I was half watching in half listening to my cousin Ashley‘s baby shower that was live on Facebook. The really exciting news is I could tolerate the cleaner again bc I had started reacting to chemicals again for a few days prior, which was super discouraging. After I finished that, i decided to see what I can do to start cleaning the tent interior. It was so overwhelming I just zipped the tent back up and walked away. I sat in the truck and talked with my mom until I needed to run and get more water so Wesley could finish the laundry. When I came back I helped him finish that up, drained the hose, covered the spigot, then we got camp packed up so that we could leave, and headed back to Albuquerque for two nights. We’ll go back on Tuesday after this craziness is over. Our next project is going to be figuring out how to decrease the intake of dust on windy days into our tent bc in sure this won’t be the only incident in the next 5 weeks. I really wished we had our truck topper last night. We’re incredibly sleep deprived so hopefully we’ll sleep well in our much quieter hotel room.