I haven’t seen any warnings from the Health Department, but I expect it won’t be long. It’s been too nice, this never-ending spring. Here it is May, and we still have these delirious temperatures, barely reaching the 80s during the day, and at night, requiring many of us multi-generational Floridians to wear light jackets. It’s chilly out there, people! And it just seems to go on forever, like the blooming jasmine will never wilt and fade. Like we can keep wearing flannel pajamas and fur-lined slippers to get the morning newspaper. Like summer might never come. Almost like … we don’t live in Florida! Oh my gosh … have we been transported to another dimension … called New Hampshire?
Tropical weather predictions and emergency stroganoff
The Colorado State University Tropical Meteorology Project recently issued its 2018 hurricane season forecast. They are calling for 14 named storms, seven hurricanes and a whopping three major churners this season. (“Major churner” is meteorological lingo for “Watch out ‘cus your hindquarters might wash away!”) Colorado State’s latest prediction prompted all of the tropical world to ask: Why are a bunch of ski bums out West talking to us about hurricanes?!? They’ve never been in the cone of uncertainty! We don’t go and make blizzard predictions for them! Why do they have to ruin our otherwise peaceful spring? Or at least, can’t they use more comforting language. They could have said: “Expect a slightly above-average chance of wind ripping your roof off. Oh, and maybe look into what a truck-load of canned meat costs.” Would that be so hard? Anyway, after two years of storms wreaking havoc on St. Augustine, and with all this talk of hurricane season coming, it has gotten me thinking more seriously about storm planning.
A Florida yard braces for more leaf-burning cold
I have a Florida yard. A Florida yard is loaded with nice, flowery plants that don’t need a lick of water, attract butterflies and hummingbirds and bees, and look pretty much bountiful all year-round. EXCEPT … if the temperature dips below 86 degrees. At which point the entire yard packs up and moves to Miami on a Greyhound bus. Or worse, shrivels up and dies, leaving behind a brown, crunchy wasteland. The surface of Mars is not so desolate, barren or sad. My dune daisies are wrecked. The porter’s weed looks like it has been stricken by a case of vegetative mange. And the bougainvillea — so happy to impale me with its saber-tooth thorns just a couple of weeks ago — has dropped every leaf it could find, ordered more on Amazon, and then dropped them, too. The aesthetic of my yard right now? Dead sticks in creepy forest. I tried to save them all. Or as best as I could considering we had several nights of sub-freezing weather, and I can’t really get too motivated with anything involving the word “sub.”
Cold, Florida weather and the soothsaying acorns
Cold. So cold. Teeth chattering. Bones aching. Lips chapping. Dog not going outside unless I stand with the door open while screaming, “Be gone with you, wretched cur!!!” (My neighbors always pass by at the same, exact moment and report me to Animal Control.) It’s not my fault: It’s winter, and my dog would prefer I put out a stack of newspapers and let her do her business inside. It’s cold out there, and she has no interest in braving it. I don’t either. What is this chilly stuff? Is this not Florida, a state so immune to freezing weather that the snow shovel is listed as an endangered species? The other day I had to go do the unthinkable: root around in my closet in search of — GASP! — a sweater. I didn’t even know I had one. It was moth-eaten and covered in dust — a relic from 1996 when I bought it as a joke, or to use as a rag while changing my car’s oil. But after the cold snap this week, we Floridians could use a few sweaters. And some mittens and scarves and ear muffs … and about 17 batts of insulation to wrap around us with duct tape. It is cold, and we don’t know how to hack it! I watched bleary-eyed at the weather map as a mass of light snow moved across north Florida toward Jacksonville. Ouch! Not a sight you see every day.
The meaning behind a Christmas light car ride
It doesn’t help that it’s 76 degrees outside, and that when you file into the car, there are mosquitoes buzzing your ears. But gather up your family, no matter what the temperature, and load them in for a spin around town looking for Christmas lights, and you’ll feel the holiday spirit, even in Florida … where it feels more like a rotisserie chicken than December. The temperature doesn’t matter as you roll around looking for the most garish, the most over-the-top, the most outlandish, retina-blinding, chaotic spectacles of light that anyone can plant in their yard. There are houses drowned in blow-up lawn decorations with absolutely no thought put into how they’re grouped together. Hula Santa in board shorts hanging with frigid North Pole Santa and penguins? Who cares! It’s Christmas! Houses displaying taste and grace and a holiday sensibility with simple, twinkling white lights and dignified Christmas wreathes. And houses that look like their owners bought up the entire holiday sale aisle and then dumped them out of a helicopter.
Big, dang TV time
There are moments in our lives when insights reveal themselves in special events and the world is never the same again. The birth of a child. A marriage. A devastating illness or injury. A milestone birthday. A career change. Or when you realize your TV screen isn’t big enough. BLAMMO! Hurricane Irma did it for me. We were staying with friends — designated by the county as the official Thompson evacuation shelter — and I was watching The Weather Channel, mesmerized. “That’s a big dang TV!” I told my friend. “I mean, it’s like a Jumbotron. I’m seriously concerned Irma might just roar out it and bowl me over. If I still have a house after this, I need a big dang TV, too!” He just looked at me and said: “Yeah man, I think you do.” Thank you, Hurricane Irma. You have helped me to see the light.
Memories of the Indomitable Irma
The phone call came from my mother the night before St. Augustine evacuated for Hurricane Irma: “Brian! I don’t have any dry cat food to leave Missy Daisy and Little Joe! I only bought wet food in cans! What was I thinking?!? They don’t know how to use the can opener yet!” I’m not sure where the mix-up occurred. The cats weren’t going with my mother when she left for the hotel. The stacks of cat food cans would be worthless. Even worse, when she finally realized this, there was no Friskies to be found anywhere. The kitty food shelves were bare. These was desperate straits! Now I was being dispatched on a secret commando mission to find cat food: “CVS HAS SOME! I JUST CALLED! REMEMBER … MISSY DAISY DOESN’T LIKE SEAFOOD … ONLY BEEF!!!” It sounded like something from a war movie. Some frantic soldier on the front line calling in artillery fire to keep the swarming enemy at bay. I pointed at my daughter: “You’re coming with me. I want sanity on my side.”
Hey Hurricane Irma, you left a tree on my house!
“There’s a tree on my house.” If you ever say these words out loud, your ears will hear them, question what was just said, and spark an internal debate: “A tree on my house? Is that what I just said? No! There can’t be a tree on my house.” Only, yes. It IS a tree. And it’s leaning on my house. Look! There it was. A photo in a text from my neighbor. My neighbor, Forest, stays through all the storms. Even better, he sends me texts, photos and videos at all hours. This year during Hurricane Irma he even streamed live video from his upstairs porch. The news is always good. That’s what I was expecting when the texts came in the morning after the storm. But they showed damage on the street. A transformer dangling from a pole. A massive tree that took out power lines clear over to Riberia Street, two blocks away. Then I saw it. It was agonizingly slow to load, taxing the struggling cel network in the powerless neighborhood where my family had evacuated to. It was of a pink house — boy, that’s similar to mine! — with a big cedar tree parked against an upstairs porch. GASP! “There’s a TREE on my HOUSE!!!”
A column … with Hurricane Irma on its mind
So, here’s the thing: I’m supposed to sit down, right now, and write this thing. This column. Which is usually fun, and hopefully funny. Usually, that’s the goal when I sit down to write. But here’s the thing: It’s Tuesday night. And I’m sitting down, and I’m thinking to myself, “Who cares? This thing comes out Sunday! Hurricane Irma may be here by Sunday. St. Augustine may be up to its eyeballs in water … again. And I’m supposed to sit down and write a COLUMN?!?” And the phone keeps ringing. Mostly it’s my mother. She’s worried about where she’s going to go in the storm if we have to evacuate. Actually, she wasn’t worried. Not until I made her worried. Because she had a hotel room booked by the interstate. They would take her dog. Maybe even her two cats, if she snuck them in with a picnic basket. She had it all thought out, and she was pretty proud. Then she called me. I had to — no pun intended — rain on her parade. “Tuesday!?!” I said. “You booked your rooms for Tuesday? The storm will be here already!” How did I know this? I don’t! I didn’t know anything. Because I’m not a meteorologist. I’m just a guy who is supposed to be sitting down to write a column. But instead I’ve been staring at hurricane forecast models on the Internet. Spaghetti models by fancy computers that may or may not have anything to do with […]
Spring dumped a New York blizzard named ‘Stella’
I paced back and forth. Up and down the block, under the cover of a hotel awning. Weary to venture out. Is that black ice? Can high-powered snowflakes kill? If you get hit by a snowplow, do they just shove you in a snow bank and leave you until the city thaws? No Floridian should be here. In an epic spring-time storm. A winter-esque blizzard that even the northerners freaked out about. They were careful on the roads. They skipped work and school. They shutdown trains and fired up snow blowers. They sprinkled salt everywhere, even on their salads. And they mourned the tulips they had planted the week before when it was 60 degrees and supposed to be spring. Ha! This was a Noreaster, combining with a polar blast of snow cutting across the Midwest. They called it Stella. A she-devil who was supposed to bring 12-18 inches of snow to New York City. I was there for a College Media Conference. It seemed like a good thing to attend … until I learned their HIGH temperatures wouldn’t crack the lowest I had seen all year. Um … ha? I paced back and forth, trying to decide whether to trudge into those cotton-candy whiffs of white drifting down. Piling up on the street like someone shaking powdered sugar all over the city. To trudge out into it or not to trudge? That is a Floridian’s question. But no Floridian — not one who had been through a hurricane last […]