Fog. White out. For a while early, it cleared back a bit such that from 7H I could see the close-by harbor navigation lights, but not those across the Bay, nor the light atop the tower over toward the Pass, nor the airfield beacon at Tyndall AFB. But, back and forth, it's back, Fog, 64° humidity 97%, with dew point of 63° that, I've learned from Ross Whitley on Channel 13, makes fog virtually certain when temperature and dew point are the same. Dense Fog Advisory It's Tuesday morning again, and, what? Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November. All the rest have thirty one, except February (or as the old poke says, Thirty days hath Septober, April, June, and No-wonder; all the rest have peanut butter, except chifforobe: it's a tall thing, with big drawers). 31 January 2023 of the year in which my 88th birthday will come and go. Do you realize how old 88 is? Well I don't.  +++++++++++ As Tuesday lightens, fog is receding and Creation is as ...

  Sadness this morning as I keep checking Elizabeth Anagnostis MacWhinnie's FB page for medical updates on Anthony.  Father Anthony. First assignment after he was ordained, Anthony worked with me as his mentor for a year at St Thomas by the Sea, Laguna Beach. Very casual and easy, Anthony was fun to serve with. A b right man who at first glance doesn't appear to be the intellectual that he is, Anthony's a marine scientist, the field he worked in before theological seminary, and he liked to share with me fascinating knowledge about sea life.  Anthony's a Pensacola native who grew up fishing and hunting, an avid outdoor sportsman who enjoyed cooking everything he shot. Anthony's parents, both dead now, apparently were also outdoors people: Anthony once told me that his mother could tell by its taste, which Pensacola area bayou a mullet came from. When we had parish suppers at St Thomas that year, Anthony always prepared and brought something delicious from the wild.  ...

  This week's email from N T Wright seeks to enroll me in a class about responsibly preaching on current events, social issues, instead of standing on the sidelines - - as most of us do for fear of offending contributors who think religion and politics don't mix unless it affirms their viewpoint. People want to hear what they are already certain of. In many churches, stirring up things is a way for the preacher to get fired. Most of us are afraid to share the Bible and other Church and Religious and Theological knowledge we worked so hard on in seminary, lest we anger the literalist fundamentalists in our congregations. Slightly braver than some, in my Time I tried to at least use my Sunday school platform to help openminded adults out of kindergarten Sunday school. Current events, social issues. Transparency, released to the public and some may wish to view the Tyre Nichols videos. Not me, life as it is has sufficient stress, I have loved ones of my own about whose safety I am...

  As you age into where I now find myself, you may, but I doubt it, be as immersed in this contemplation as I am: "Who or What Am I?" It has always tugged at me, I've struggled with it all my life, at least as long as I remember, including as a child, and including as a child sensing myself as different because I'm me: why is this Being that is Me here, now, inside this human? Not philosophical, it's more existential, and sometimes includes the Why? It's a puzzle, as in "Life gets teejus, don't it".  Yet when I note that my Being didn't bother me all those eons before I was conceived and born and became self-aware, it resolves down to making no difference whatsoever, nomesane? Blogging yielded this answer that helps: Who Or What Am I? I am a living, breathing organism signified by the words ‘human being’. I am a material or physical being fairly recognisable over time to me and to others: I am a body. Through my body, I can move, touch, see, ...

Dearly Departed, Again I Dreamt About a Ship  Camonghne Felix When a mouth aboard said ship  called out to me, I was a berry  turned sour by sun’s  neglect, an old ornament gone  unglossed. It spoke to me & warranted a new way of listening & at once  I heard two crows, heard both.  For years, that strange whistle  of new language nettled me sloppily  its orientation unmapped. I let it  holler too long untended, & after  too long an ignorance it came back  to beat me, a bullet of tenacity.  I took too long to know its nature  & now I count a debt. It takes  exactly this much effort to tell you  that I have been stayed. Stayed by  a new forgetfulness, stayed by an urgent condition, a mother warbler  feeding me melons by the whole.  Is there a mouth as hungry  as mine? As wide in its receiving?  I open to a 30th orbit  & want for nothing more than the syrup of f...

Standing stealthy and motionless six inches to a foot deep seven levels below 7H, two white wading birds and a gray wading bird stare intently at silver flashes in water just beyond them. They seem to feed mainly on minnows, but wildlife videos online show them also eating frogs, snatching up and, with head and long beak tilted up, gulping down and swallowing ducklings and little burrowing mammals. Everything is not as innocent as it appears. Rattling nuclear weapons, Putin warns the West about sending main battle tanks to Ukraine. He has gotten away with bullying destruction of neighboring states before - - how close he is willing to push before the sky lights up over Moscow and the Kremlin may be the rhetorical question. What will he do? This is a creeping and testing sort of international relations in warfare.  When I heard lectures on and studied war gaming at the U S Naval War College, the premise was that we planned based on the enemy's capabilities, not on his...

  Whoa! lightning, thunder, wind and rain to start our Wednesday. Panama City is under a tornado watch, and already there's a tornado warning to the west of us for a waterspout moving in from the Gulf of Mexico. With their knowledge, experience, confidence-inspiring presence, Rotation Detector and all the latest, we have two top weather folks on Channel 13, Ross Whitley and Kristen Kennedy, both of them are up right now. Ready and reliable, our First Alert Storm Team cannot be beat for keeping us safe. Supper last evening, a happy reunion at Captain's Table with Robert, first Time since covid. Oysters, fried catfish, and they had one whole mullet to fry, which we shared. At this age we can't again let two or three years go by between meetings.  Leopard and Abrams tanks being approved for Ukraine, hopefully they can maintain, operate, fuel, keep them running and use them effectively. It will be a fatal error if we cringe fearfully from Putin, who needs to experience no saf...

  January 24, 1938 my sister Gina Louise Weller was born. I was two years and four months old, and have no conscious memory of it, nor did Time allow for sibling jealousy or rivalry to develop, possibly because exactly a year and a half later, on July 24, 1939, our brother Walter Gentry Weller was born. All our growing up years, Gina & Walt were a team combining to happen, and happening. Around the Time Walt was was born, being by then almost four years old, I do have a vivid memory: Mama's health being severely at risk, I was staying with my Gentry grandparents in Pensacola, and it was when my aunt Margaret Harrison Gentry, wife of mama's older brother Wilbur, died of spinal meningitis. Born in 1913, she would have been 26 years old. The image in my mind is of mama's sister Mildred, whom at the Time I called Minnie but later DD, DeeDee, took me, and my first cousin Margaret Ann and her brother Bill, into the living room of the house at 1317 East Strong...

  IDK, besides rabbits and other small prey, it was one of many shots when I looked at eagle captures, including large snakes, a sizable shark, deer, a mountain goat and others. Judging by the pointed snout, that's a crocodile, not an alligator, eh? But is it real or somebody's spoof? IDK. Besides people, do large reptiles really have predators? Well, other reptiles, constrictor snakes, and we learned at Wakulla Springs last October that their alligator population is kept in check by predator birds and larger alligators eating the smaller ones. If you call foul on this photograph, fine by me, it doesn't appear that the eagle's claws are much imbedded in the croc's skin, but IDK. It could be interesting to eat a live crocodile. ++++++++++ "In the former Time he brought into contempt the land of Zebulon and the land of Naphtali, but in the latter Time he will make glorious the Way of the Sea" (Isaiah 9). Yesterday was good at church, the Bible readings, and ...

  Raining like what the Irish jokes I read online yesterday call "the bejaysus" and, though hoping nothing leaks in, we have towels in the front windows just in case. These telltale reminders of Category 5 Hurricane Michael are holding on for years. There are in fact still blue roofs around town and the county. In this morning's column, Sean of the South visits Selma, Alabama and talks about what he sees and senses there after the tornado swept through. Conditioned, I feel sure, by his father's suicide, Sean does lean into sad stories, and what he sees in Selma is indeed sad.  Selma may be a good place, as may many places, but with no particular reason to work at flushing it out, Selma, to me, is a symbol of Dr King's march and the murder of Jonathan Myrick Daniels. +++++++++++ Google's front-page art likes to herald current events, and, I'm not positive, but  this morning seems to get the jump on Spring by anticipating Easter with a subtly male Easter Bun...

  What kicks off my predawn thoughts as it's too dark early to risk waking Caroline by texting Happy Birthday and sending little red hearts? I'll wait until it's at least after six o'clock in Tallahassee. It's a news headline that reads, "The State Department wants memos written in Calibri now, not Times New Roman" and calls to mind my own struggle with typefaces, fonts, for use on +Time. As well as trying B for Bold and other notions, over its dozen years, my +Time blogposts have used a few different fonts as I sought to overcome their turning out too faint for easy reading once published. I wanted a naturally heavy-looking sans serif font with some individual letter designs that appealed to me. Did you ever notice that letters, both uppercase and lowercase, have different designs in different typefaces? Some of the letters, lowercase "G" especially, and some lowercase "Z", have fascinating designs? In my search, one, Wunderlich, stood...