The Garbage Storm and a PD Patch

I brought Miss Caroline to the airport late last night after a wonderful three days together.

We got great (although unsurprisingly hot) weather...during the day.

Once evening rolled around, we got a lot of this:

(Caroline's photo)

This is how it storms in the desert. It will be torrential downpour one mile from where you're standing (usually in or near the mountains) and be perfectly clear nearby. The other weird part about the storms here is the extreme wind. Sand storms are pretty normal and with rain usually comes 30-40 mph winds. The other night we dubbed it "the garbage storm of 2011," for obvious reasons. It's dirty down here and there is a lot of garbage so when the wind kicks up, garbage is often flying everywhere.

In addition to freak weather, we had an adventure like only we can. Caroline's BF is a cop in Minnesota and he collects police badges from different precincts where he visits. So he asked Caroline and I to locate an MP patch and an El Paso PD patch for his collection.

The MP patch was easy. We went to a GI Outfitters a mile from post and paid $6. Done.

The EPPD patch? Not so easy. Actually, it was plenty easy, we just chose to make it harder then it had to be. We were told that if you go to the cop-shop and "swap" patches, it's usually a pretty smooth process. We weren't comfortable just waltzing into a police station (you know, because we both have so much to hide) for whatever reason, so we tried to visit a couple uniform shops first. 6 stops later and we found one place that had them but wouldn't sell them without a department ID, which we obviously didn't have.

After contemplating getting pulled over for a speeding ticket in order to find a cop who could help, we drove to the station where we were greeted by a lovely older lady at the front desk. Within 10 minutes extremely good-looking Sgt. Johnny was shaking our hands. He was apparently the resident "swapper" and was more then happy to give us a patch. He also asked for contact info so he could arrange additional swaps in the future. Clearly, we had no reason to avoid the police station. At least it created an adventure in the process.

The rest of our time was spent playing Yahtzee, drinking beer margaritas and wine, shopping, sushi, and laying by the pool. It was a great week and I am so lucky to have a bestie that sensed my need for some "back-home" company and haul her butt down here to hang with me. I'm seriously a lucky girl.

Now it's time to switch gears, put on my packing pants and prepare for my last week in Texas.

It's going to be a crazy week...