Wednesday, 1 June 2022
It’s that time of year. Today is the first day of hurricane season and we are already looking at a potential tropical storm hitting the west coast of Florida and exiting the east coast. In like a lion, out like a lamb? Not so sure. The system gained strength going across the Yucatan.
Wilma (2005) crossed the west coast over to the east coast and all the forecasters predicted a weakening system. Seems they forgot there are no mountain ranges in the Everglades and the Everglades is mostly water heated by a land mass. Wilma increased in intensity before it hit Fort Lauderdale. (Wikipedia says it weakened, but I don’t thing that is correct.)
I don’t remember the last time that the forecasters predicted a lower than normal hurricane season. So far, I’ve been through three significant hurricanes in Florida: Andrew, Katrina, and Wilma. I was in Mississippi during Camille but I was far enough away that all we had to worry about was tornadoes. I was stationed on the CGC Reliance in Corpus Christi and we put out to sea to weather both. For one of those, one of our Diesel engines broke down and we had to ride that one out in port. At least with hurricanes you can prepare a little for them, unlike tornadoes.
I tried to get by without a Benadryl last night and did OK until about 5:30 this morning when I started itching. I realized it wasn’t worth it to stay in bed, got up and slathered on anti-itch lotion and popped a daytime Claritin. That seemed to calm things down.
I did ask my GP for an allergist recommendation and he came through with three names. The one on the top of the list happens to be the rheumatologist that I am scheduled to see in July (teleconference) so I’ll talk to her not only about rheumatoid arthritis but also my itching. I guess I’ll be popping Benadryl until the middle of July. At least it allows me to sleep.
Since I was up at 5:30, I made it out for my walk around 7:30 and it was actually semi-cool. Of course, by the time I finished my walk, the sun was much higher and so was the humidity. I finally got back to my yoga and swimming. The last two days I was about to get into the pool it started raining. The rain today was at least in the afternoon and I got a full range of exercise in.
My neighbor Chris picked me up at 11:30 and we headed to Hardy Park Bistro for an early lunch. It has some outside seating (it was warm even with fans) and the food is consistently good and fairly reasonably priced for restaurants these days.
I admit to being slightly depressed the last few days (no exercise) and feeling I had lost a significant amount of photos when my hard drive was replaced. A few days ago, I finally had an inspiration and typed “photos” in Finder and voilà! The problem was getting them back into the Photos program. It looked like it was going to take me three lifetimes to get them back by selecting each photo and dragging. Unfortunately, they were not arranged in groups.
Then I decided to look at the location on the images and the ones that I needed were listed on the Cloud under “Media.” I clicked on it and downloaded 13,000+ photos. There were my missing photos! Now all I have to do is go through the 13,000+ and put them back into albums for ease of reference. Then I have to relabel them. I figure I’m down to one and one half lifetimes to complete the job. The loss of the photos wouldn’t have destroyed me but getting them back was a little bit of happiness for me.
South Florida is in for a week of rainy days with the most intense period scheduled for Saturday morning. Let’s hope the street drains are all clear!
Stay tuned!