H.Ian

Eleven o'clock appointment for our covid booster vaccine, Linda keeps up with it, I can't remember whether this is shot number four or number five, I think five?

And I'm due for my fall 2022 flu shot.

If Jim Cantore is in your neighborhood you've got problems. Thank God, he's not broadcasting from StAndrews Marina this morning, but Hurricane Season is not over, it's just revving up. Thanks apparently to a cold front coming down from northwest that nudged H.Ian south and east (but is not strong enough to keep it out in the Atlantic once it crosses the Florida peninsula), we have fine weather for Wednesday; but, mind, there's another red X out in the Atlantic, we don't have a cancellation, we have a raincheck, so keep throwing salt over your shoulder and praying to that rabbit's foot.

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Vaccine at Winn-Dixie pharmacy, fried catfish from their deli, a catfish sandwich for noon dinner today, nice.

Watching H.Ian push ashore at Sanibel, the eyewall crossing as I watch, where our friend Philip Johnson had a specialty shop that he and Eddy called Ile Crocodile. At the moment, Sanibel Island is in the eye of the storm. H.Ian seems to be confirming H.Michael that the New Normal is high category storms, ratcheting up substantially before coming on land.

There were maybe ten officers in my section at Naval War College, Newport, RI, 1968-1969, several services, commanders, lieutenant commanders, majors. One was a Navy dentist, we had an Army intelligence officer who had interesting gossip to share. Another had flown hurricane hunter planes, C-130s, and told about the Time they punched in, as he put it, emerged in the eye to have a tornado twisting right before their eyes, swerved to miss it only to be headed directly for another tornado.

Each officer student had a secure safe, and a constant trove of secret and top secret materials to be reading. We were under orders that any time we left the room, we were to lock the classified material in our safe. The promise was, that if you were caught having left the room either with your safe open or classified material on your desktop, you would be having a personal interview with the vice admiral who was president of the college. One officer, a Navy commander, was constantly leaving the room and forgetting to secure his stuff, and we'd cover for him. Finally, and it turned out to be the last Time he forgot, we put all his classified material back in his safe, along with a note that we signed as the Navy captain in charge of security, ordering him to report to the admiral's office. When he returned and opened his safe, several of us were there watching. Along with his near heart-attack and all the holy-esses and OMGs and my career is over exclamations, we let him stew for a few minutes before we told him what we had done, and that instead of getting pee-oh-ed, he should regard it as a drill, because we weren't always there to cover and it was only a matter of Time before he actually got caught.

Have I said this? I loved my Navy career, absolutely loved it the first eleven years, through war college, which was our second tour in Newport. From there I went to sea again, deployed to WestPac during the Vietnam War, and from there on I couldn't wait to clock nine more years for twenty years and retire. Come next February, I'll have been retired forty-five years. Would I do it all again? Well, no. As the preacher says in his blessing every Sunday, my friends, life is short, and we haven't much Time. This doesn't really begin to sink in and ring true until you try to blow out eighty-seven candles on your birthday cake.

So, no. I'd serve my three years, get out, come home to Panama City, and I'd never again cross the Bay County line in any direction.

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Did you know they don't count a hurricane as "making landfall" until the center point of the eyewall comes ashore? Jiminy. Half the monster is already on land by then.

RSF&PTL