Oh, Those End-of-Summer Blues & They Call the Wind…Sally

Don’t know why
There’s no sun up in the sky
Stormy weather – Harold Arlen & Ted Koehler

Well, it’s now early Sunday afternoon here in my corner of…er…not Paradise, but Florida, and the day is still a bit gray, damp, and even blustery.

Right now it’s mostly sunny – at least at the spot where the weather data was collected – and the temperature is 77˚F (25˚C). It has been raining on and off since I woke up, as squalls from Tropical Storm Sally pass over this part of the state. Currently, there is a 14 MPH breeze blowing from the northwest, and the forecast for the rest of the afternoon and into the evening hours still includes some scattered thunderstorms. A fun day this Sunday? Not a chance.

August and September mark the peak of the hurricane season here in the Sunshine State, and I long ago learned to accept it as part of living in the subtropical region known as Hurricane Alley. I was too young to remember the passing-through of Hurricane Betsy in the 1965 season, and since we moved away from the United States for a six-year-period after that, I remember that South Florida was spared the horrors of a destructive hurricane until August of 1992.

That’s when – of course – Hurricane Andrew roared through southern Miami-Dade County and caused billions of dollars of property damage and killed – directly and indirectly – 44 Floridians before heading over the Gulf (as Tropical Storm Sally  is doing) and barreling into Louisiana before dissipating over the South on the 28^th of August.

I actually forgot about Tropical Storm Sally’s existence; I have a TV in my study, but I don’t have a cable connection and can only access the local news if I go out into the TV/family room, which has the only cable-connected set that I can watch. I broke my habit of watching local and TV news since I moved from my former home, and the people I share the residence with are not necessarily news junkies.

If I hadn’t been out in the TV room a short time ago and watched the local news channel, I still would have assumed that the inclement weather was just part of the normal Florida wet season, which begins early in May and ends in November.

I’m tired. I slept poorly last night, and I have no idea what to do after I take my shower and change into clean clothes. Should I watch a movie? Read a book? Play a session of Cold Waters? I don’t feel like doing any of those, but it’s not like I can call up one of my friends and go out for a beer or see a movie. Here, I have no friends at all besides the folks I live with, whereas in my old neighborhood I at least knew a score of people, perhaps more. The COVID-19 pandemic would have limited what we could do socially, but limited options are far better than none, I always say.

If there’s a bright spot to this blustery and gloomy not-Funday Sunday, it is this: my Star Wars The Black Series Han Solo (Carbonite) (Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back 40^th Anniversary) figure arrived sometime after noon. I haven’t opened the cardboard Amazon Prime box to look at the cardback package, but it is in my study.