Around 2:30 a.m., a loud bang that shook the rig thrust me out of deep sleep. WTF?! I then noticed that the awful winds had returned. I clambered out of the loft to investigate, the noise having been way too loud to ignore.

I stumbled into the kitchen, found a light, and the sight that greeted me was so unexpected that it took a moment for my sleep addled brain to grasp it. My front door had blown open and I had belongings strewn down the stairwell onto the beach. Outside, the winds of Hades whipped about and icy pellets of rain were falling loudly.

After Tabitha’s great escape, I make checking the door the last part of my evening routine. Had I done that before bed? I was so out of my senses that I couldn’t even remember. I picked up everything and tried to close the door. It wouldn’t catch. I tried again.

After a few attempts, I noticed that the deadbolt was on and that it wouldn’t turn off from inside. I tried with a key and succeeded. I still couldn’t close the door. Holy moly, the door had opened so violently that the secondary lock, that I never use, had activated! Where was a key for it? Oh, right.

I grabbed a spare set of keys that had the secondary lock key on it and fumbled to get the dang thing functional. The wind was blowing so hard that I knew I had no hope of getting the door properly shut from inside. I forced it shut from outside and reentered through the cab.

By this time, I was slightly more awake and I realised I had to do a headcount. Tabitha was cowering in the study. Neelix was AWOL.

I went back out into the maelstrom with a flashlight, calling his name quietly, knowing that the sound of my voice wouldn’t carry to the neighbours over the roar of the wind. I started by checking under Miranda and out of the corner of my eye, I saw a tail go by.

It was impossible to track the passage of time, but it didn’t seem to take that long to coax him out from under Miranda to under Moya to him finally letting me grab him. But once we were inside and I checked the time, more than an hour had passed since the big bang.

The night that followed was interminable. The cats were jittery. I managed to stab myself in the chin with a nail and had to get back out of bed to find paper towels to stop the bleeding. My dreams were incredibly vivid.

At 7:00, I got up to put the computer on charge in the truck and then decided to try to get another couple hours of sleep. After an hour and a half, I gave up.

The winds are still roaring, but there is quite a bit of blue sky and sun this morning. Perhaps I should give that goat to the wind gods?