Hi, there. Dear Reader. It’s late morning here in Lithia, Florida on Friday, May 20, 2022. It’s a dark, stormy, and cool late spring day in the Tampa Bay area. Currently, the temperature is 74°F (23°C) under cloudy skies. With humidity at 90% and the wind blowing from the southeast at 4 MPH (7 KM/H), the feels-like temperature is 74°F (23°C). The forecast for today calls for thunderstorms and a high of 92°F (33°C). Tonight, the rain will persist until late into the night. The low will be 74°F (23°C).
The day has been “dark and stormy” since the early morning hours. It was raining when I woke up at 7:20 AM Eastern Daylight Time, and we’ve already had a few thunderstorms pass through Hillsborough County. A front is passing through Central Florida, and it is the start of the rainy season in the subtropics, so, yes. It’s not going to be a lovely day outside – or for the use of electronic devices connected to a wall socket, for that matter.
For those of you who are interested in what I watched last night: I considered watching either Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace or Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. Yesterday was the anniversary of both movies’ release; The Phantom Menace opened on Wednesday, May 19, 1999, whilst Revenge of the Sith was released on Wednesday, May 19, 2005. I have every Star Wars film – yes, even the 2008 Star Wars: The Clone Wars animated one – so I could have watched either one at any time, even from my PC.
However, I have been feeling melancholic for some time now, and I didn’t want to watch a Star Wars movie. I miss Mom, my old house, and the friends that I still have in South Florida, as well as friends that I watched many of the Star Wars films when I was younger but moved away eons ago, and I thought that viewing The Phantom Menace or Revenge of the Sith would just reopen old wounds. So, I watched part of The War: A Ken Burns Film instead.
Of course, I remembered that I’d watched that with Mom when it was originally aired on Miami’s WPBT-Channel 2, the South Florida PBS station between September 23 and October 7, 2007. I still recall that Mom was so into The War that when a thunderstorm forced us to unplug the TV in her room – to avoid losing the set to an errant lightning strike – right in the middle of A World Without War, the seventh and final episode of the series, she encouraged me to buy the DVD set from Amazon.
I wasn’t a member of Amazon Prime then, nor did Amazon have a warehouse in the Miami area, so we had to wait a week till we received the brand-new DVD box set. Mom even paid the $78.99 credit card bill – in part because she didn’t want me to pay the bill, but mostly because she wanted to see how The War ended!
I still have that DVD box set even though I prefer to watch the Blu-ray set that I bought here in Lithia, just like I still have my 2004 DVD box set of the original Star Wars trilogy – a 41st birthday present from Mom – in a place of honor on one of my bookshelves.
As I write this, the rain has resumed, so I think the thunderstorms will start popping off in a few hours. I don’t know exactly what I’ll do if we are stuck beneath a cell or – worse – a supercell of boomers. If I use any computer at all, it would be my laptop, and I’d have to run it on battery power only.
I could also just read a book – my TBR stack is as high as the Empire State Building – and kill time while losing myself in a nonfiction book – Who Can Hold the Sea: The U.S. Navy in the Cold War, 1945-1960 is the most likely choice – or a novel along the lines of Team Yankee: A Novel of World War III.
If the bad weather consists of “just rain” and no storms pass through the Fish Hawk section of Lithia, I might just stick to my usual “stay at my desk till dinner” routine. Or maybe I’ll watch a few episodes of The Office on my Blu-ray player/TV. Considering that it is the start of our rainy season and we’ve already heard thunder in the morning, this is the least likely scenario, but, hey. A guy can hope, right?
Well, I’ve said my piece, so I’ll close for now. Until next time, Dear Reader, stay safe, stay healthy, unplug your electronic devices in a thunderstorm, and I’ll catch you on the sunny – or at least not stormy – side of things.
A Certain Point of View, Too 
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