Mid-Year Day Update: Yep, the Forecast Was Right…Looks Like Those Boomers are Building Up!

Good afternoon, Dear Reader. It is now just past 2 PM Eastern in Lithia, Florida on a hot, humid summer day in the Tampa Bay area. Currently, the temperature is 90°F (32°C) under sunny skies. With humidity at 64% and the wind blowing from the west-southwest at 5 MPH (9 KM/H), the heat index is 101°F (38°C). It still looks like we’re going to get thunderstorms later this afternoon, so the forecast for today has not changed since this morning’s post.

I thought about spending some of my Saturday playing a session of Crusade in Europe; recently I took a hiatus from the reissued version of the 1985 MicroProse Software wargame that depicts strategic combat during the 1944 Allied campaign in Northwest Europe; Crusade in Europe was one of my favorite games when I owned an Apple IIe back in the late Eighties and early Nineties, and it’s one of the few that I keenly missed when that first computer died over 20 years ago. It was reissued earlier this year on Steam by Atari – one of the companies that own the rights to the original MicroProse, which closed shop in the early 2000s – along with other titles, such as Decision in the Desert and Conflict in Vietnam.

I decided against it, though, because even though it’s still sunny here in Lithia, the weather is going to deteriorate. In fact, one of my weather apps has a “rain coming” status indicator, and sometimes a passing cloud eclipses the sun and lowers the light levels in my room. I don’t want to play one of Crusade in Europe’s short scenarios, but by the same token I can’t tackle the longer ones; there’s no Save Game functionality because the game was designed in the good old days when we saved data on floppy discs and not on the hard drive.

So, rather than shut down the game halfway through a battle because it’s storming outside, I’d rather avoid the annoyance and will play Crusade in Europe some other time.

If I do play anything, it will more than likely be the Klondike version of solitaire on Microsoft Games. I’m pretty good at it; it doesn’t take a long to play, and if I have to go offline because of inclement weather, I can resume the game later when there’s no lightning or thunder around.

What will I do when – not if – the boomers arrive in the neighborhood? Read, of course! I am still in the first few chapters of Fire & Steel: The End of World War Two in the West, so I plan to settle down, book in hand, on the living room couch and read through the storm. If the thunderstorms pass through the Lithia area quickly, I might try to watch a movie or a few episodes of The Office.

Aside from that, there’s not much to tell, so I will take my leave of you on this increasingly cloudy and possibly stormy Saturday. Until next time, Dear Reader, stay safe, stay healthy, and I’ll see you on the less stormy side of things.