Happy noon to all!!
I was up a bit pre-dawn and got to the beach just as the Sun broke the ocean surface. About 85F/29C air and 83F/28C water at dawn. Near ideal. A totally clear horizon & sea, something we rarely get. napped & swam and walked & soaked up the relatively safe low-angle sunrays for a couple hours. Her Ladyship awoke and we met for breakfast at a nearby place. I had a chorizo & egg scramble w cotijo, sour cream, and sliced fresh jalapenos. Muy picante y tres yummie. Now I’m sheveled and my weekly laundry is drying.
The surf was up a bit due to hurricane Franklin churning way out in the Atlantic. The breeze, unusually, was from the south essentially parallel to the beach, rather than the more usual from the east perpendicular to the beach. Yup, the outermost influences of Idalia churning the Gulf of Mexico. As the morning wore on we’ve gotten more puffy clouds, all flowing generally the same way. It’s warmed up to a cozy 90F/32C.
Expectations are those puffies and perhaps a shower are about all we’ll see from Idalia. The west coast of FL are the folks with a problem. Lucky us. This time. In FL it’s always wise to not send to ask for whom the hurricane churns; it churns for thee.
Hooray for Cookie’s progress and it sounds like Nellie’s about to walk ( hobble?) the same successful course to recovery. But not without sweat and curses. Best of luck to you both.
Taters: That’s so excellent to hear!!!1!. And even better that the whole lazy organization hasn’t coalesced against your efforts to have everyone pull their weight.
You’re a pro and have doubtless already figured this out, but the MPA’s comment that she “hated to be the bad guy” is real key. Point out to her that every time she leaves you in the lurch she’s being a “bad guy” to you. Lots of folks are real sensitive to conversational awkwardness but totally oblivious to performance awkwardness. If she can begin to see that her non-performance is “bad guy” stuff too, you may turn a real corner with her. Probably not, since most humans suck at learning and change, but it’s worth a shot.
This. Dad meant well, even if he was clumsy around his not-so little girl.
One hell of a lot of human history can be laid at the feet of this pithy observation.
Well done!
Since I picked the MMP theme sort based on where I was at that instant (banging along a dusty 2 lane highway road in crazytown where they drive on the left) it seems decent for me to offer a couple of strange places and milestones.
In the military I got to tour an in-service Los Angeles-class attack submarine. And visit the facility at Vandenberg AFB where they train Minuteman missile launch crews and fire a (simulated) missile in their (simulated) control capsule. Been in a bunch of underground bunkers where they’d run a war (or at least the local battle from). Been to the then-secret museum filled with then-Soviet hardware, from tanks to SAMs to jets to … . Also visited many nameless places for nameless work. Some fun, some very much not. Definitely not the adventure I originally signed up for, but it was the adventure I got. Luckily I’m not the worse for wear, except maybe a smidgen around the edges.
Once done with that phase of life
Went to a now-defunct museum in an unused coal mine in Frankfort IL. 700 feet straight down beneath the prairie. The atomic testing museum in Las Vegas and the nuke weapons museum in Albuquerque. Lots of quirky little towns in the several states I’ve lived in. Had lunch in a diner once where it was obvious I was the first outsider anyone, customer or staff, had seen in probably a year. Their tone was mildly suspicious, well short of hostile. But if you listened real hard there was banjo music in the wind. Visited New Madrid along the lower Mississippi river. Banjo music there too. Site of the last, and next, major earthquake to destroy a large swath of the center of the continental US. Last time it was farm fields and wooden barns. Next time it’ll be Memphis, St Louis, Nashville, Little Rock, and Louisville that get it.
Visited a crossroads in Arkansas that had been a ~2 block square small town until a tornado scraped the town out of existence one day a couple years before I got there. All that remained was a few concrete slabs, and some 8-12" hardwood tree trunks snapped off 2 - 3’ above the ground. A bunch of the asphalt roadway had been peeled up by the wind and never replaced. That was weird. No banjo music. No birds. No squirrels. No nuthin’ but the sound of the wind under a clear pale blue summer sky.
