Musings & Thoughts for Wednesday, September 16, 2020: More Stormy Weather

Hi there, Dear Reader. It’s just past 5 AM Eastern in my corner of Florida, and it’s still dark outside. Right now, the temperature outside is 75 degrees Fahrenheit (24 degrees Celsius) under partly cloudy skies. As usual for a late summer day in the subtropics, the forecast for today says it’s going to be a cloudy and hot day, with the high at 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius) and some rain is expected in the evening.

Judging from the satellite map on my computer’s weather app, all of this cloudiness and rain is coming from the tail end of Hurricane Sally, which hit the Gulf Coast yesterday, affecting the coasts of Alabama and the Florida panhandle. Here we were affected by Sally’s outermost rain bands and we had a few lightning strikes and on-and-off rain last night, but that’s about it. Other parts of the Gulf have fared worse.

This has been a very active hurricane season; we are three months and two weeks into it, and we’re already past the letter S in the 2020 season’s “named storm” list. The last time I remember a season so busy was in 2005, which is when we had two hurricanes (Katrina in its Category 1 phase, then Wilma, which tore a third of my old townhouse’s roof off) hit Miami. That year was bad, and I remember hoping that I’d never have to see another hurricane season with so many (31!) tropical or subtropical storms, a record that still stands.

Well, the Atlantic hurricane season does not end until November 30, and right now we have two more systems (Hurricane Teddy and Tropical Storm Vicky) churning out at sea. It doesn’t look like either one will affect the continental United States, but it looks as though we will have to use Greek letters to denote any named storm after Wilfred forms.

I fell asleep on the Florida room’s couch while I watched the third episode of Prohibition: A Film by Ken Burns & Lynn Novick on our Blu-ray player. I was exhausted; I had slept badly the night before last and had been up since before four (same as today, really), so I was tired when I started watching it around 10 PM. Even though the episode (A Nation of Hypocrites) is riveting, I dozed off and slept until 3:37 AM Eastern. (Someone must have turned off the TV and Blu-ray player while I was sleeping, but whoever it was didn’t wake me up so I could go sleep in bed.)

I didn’t feel much like writing at that hour, so I went to the living room (which has no TV) and read part of a chapter from Twilight of the Gods: The War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945. I am more than three-fourths of the way into Ian W. Toll’s final volume of his Pacific War Trilogy, which I reviewed here yesterday.

Other than that, I really don’t have much to say, at least nothing that I can say publicly. I’m probably not going to be feeling all that well today either physically or emotionally. I’m tired, homesick, and more than a bit vexed at the way things have been going lately, not just in my personal life but with the world in general.

Well, on that note, I’ll wrap up this somewhat somber post; it’s now 6:10 AM Eastern, and soon I will have to go offline to free up the WiFi so the others here can use the Internet for work and school purposes.