gray Wednesday

 

Low-lying, thick black clouds. 71° 98% heavy overcast, intermittent lightning with response of distant rumbling thunder. It's clear, though, all the way to TAFB beacon.

"Thunderstorm expected around 11 AM" says the Weather icon on my phone, now changing to "Thunderstorms expected around 7 AM"

How's the tropical outlook?

Not ominous, encouraging in fact.

But wait - - moving west-northwest and 90% chance of formation - -

as we move on into October, our deadly Time of year, eh? Maybe I should have known better than to book hotel accommodation in Apalachicola for the end of next week? Again and always, my place of the heart, not St Andrews, but close, very close.

Why? it goes back to just after WW2, visiting there in the late 1940s with my father as he got his wholesale seafood business going. And early 1950s during my summer camp years. The most charming town imaginable, and this exquisite old church. I'd love to live here someday.

And we did someday: fourteen years, 1984-1998, an exceptional Time of life. 

Skipping a dozen years, then for a while in the twenty-teens we managed to go back to Apalachicola for a couple of overnights about once a month, suspended during covid, recently resumed but tapered off to about once, maybe twice last year. In 2023, May and October. Our much anticipated luxury adventure, but it's as far as we risk driving anymore. Go away, Disturbance 1.

Now heavy rain south of me, no longer can see the TAFB beacon.

Why do I do this nonsense, why do I write this stuff? Seems to have become almost compulsive along with the cup of hot & black, it's mental therapy, even better than disappearing into The New Yorker, or The Atlantic, or a WW2 documentary on Youtube. Although I slip and reveal too much of myself, it's even more helpful to me than the online solitaire games: Klondike, Easthaven, Spider Two-Suits, and recently Scorpion. I've got the trick on Spider Two-Suits, getting two empty stacks for maneuvering; but on Scorpion the statistic says 5 to 15% of Scorpion games are even winnable, so the probability is already against me. Cheap, too cheap even to buy a lottery ticket, I do not play any online game that I have to pay for. 

Zilch on calendar, my plan of the day is to finish watching the parts that I missed Saturday and Sunday, of Bart Ehrman's two-day New Testament symposium featuring himself and ten highly respected NT scholars. One of my most enjoyable events in recent memory. I'm an Ehrman fan anyway.

Almost seven o'clock now, silver gray world, occasional pop of thunder.

RSF&PTL

T88&c