Look here, Mother Nature: We like constants. We like patterns and concrete dates. We like things that we can count on, where there isn’t a lot of room for surprises or guesswork. We thought you did, too. See, that’s why we have “Hurricane Season.” Maybe we weren’t clear about this, but that’s the season when you are ALLOWED to send hurricanes. Or tropical storms or even sub-tropical storms like last week’s Alberto. We don’t mean to get all legal on you, but we think it should be noted that Alberto came before June 1, which officially opens “Hurricane Season” (as stipulated in the agreement you signed and had notarized.) We have this Hurricane Season because we need a little time off from the storms each year. You know, to not only get things ready, but also because we get kind of tired and burned out, man. I mean, we need a break! To be able to go to the beach and just kind of bum around the house. We like to chill! We can’t be worrying all the time about whether our roof is going to blow off. Because here’s a little secret: OF COURSE OUR ROOF IS GOING TO BLOW OFF!!! It’s held on by these tiny little screws!
Get ready for heat, Florida: It’s coming back
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.
Mysteries of the Winter Olympics
I grew up in Tampa, Florida, where if the temperature dipped below 76 degrees, the entire city moved to an evacuation shelter in Miami. Anything performed on ice or snow — or more clothes than a loin cloth — was pretty foreign to me. We didn’t ski or ice skate or launch ourselves off ice ramps. If we could get an ice cube in our tea before it melted, that was a winter sport. It’s much the same today, which is maybe why the Winter Olympics is so fascinating to me. I find myself hooked, staring at the screen, marveling at these sports I’ve never tried, or didn’t even knew existed. There are so many mysteries. For instance: • In any sport I’ve ever watched — or for that matter, anything that has ever moved — I’ve rooted for a massive crash. Cars. Poker games. Anything involving pom-poms. But in winter sports, I sit in fetal position peeking through my arms screaming, “Please Lord, don’t let that guy wipeout!” Winter crashes are terrifying, horrid and cataclysmic. On slick ice with no friction to stop them, they could go on forever, jumping barricades and shooting through town like a cartoon catastrophe. I get spasms in parts of my body I didn’t even know existed and can’t look at ice cubes for weeks.
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 Christmas Gift Search for Meaning
It’s been almost a week, so it’s time to dig through those bags of Christmas presents stacked up in the bedroom and try to make some sense of the head-scratchers. You know, the unusual and perplexing ones you received. Call it “The Christmas Gift Search for Meaning.” That’s when you try to find the answer to why someone thought you needed such a thing. Try it. It’s rather enlightening. Two portable car battery chargers – These both came from my aunt. She’s the queen of strange and mystifying Christmas gifts. Usually there’s a theme, and this year it was: “A hurricane is gonna’ kick you in your privates, so be prepared!!!” As such — and because here in St. Augustine, Fla., we’ve been through two hurricanes in a single calendar year — we got solar-powered radios, military-grade tactical flashlights AND multiple car battery chargers … just in case while fleeing a hurricane my car breaks down MULTIPLE TIMES. My aunt doesn’t understand that in this disposable age, when car batteries go dead, people just walk away and call an Uber. Even in hurricanes.
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.
Dial-it-in Christmas decorating
It may have been a world record for Christmas decorating. In fact, I think it took longer to get the boxes out of the attic than it did to get ornaments on the tree and the holiday nick-knacks dispersed about the house. I’ve nearly foregone Christmas just so I wouldn’t have to drag those dang boxes down the rickety attic steps. Nothing is worse than hitting your head multiple times, stumbling over luggage and nearly toppling out of the opening, only to be told: “No! That’s a box of Thanksgiving stuff! We need Christmas!” But once it was all down, decorating became a slapdash race this year. Even more so than previous years. At times, it looked more like net-casting or leaf-blowing than decorating. Maybe it was the weather. It felt like 120 degrees outside as I strained in the sun to put Christmas light icicles around the front porch and not get impaled on the bougainvillea. My wife reported to her aunt in Long Island that it was a very Florida Christmas: “We’re all in shorts, the doors are open and we’ve got the AC running.” Maybe that had something to do with the not-so-festive mood. The just-get-it-done approach. Like we were at the beach, not the North Pole.
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.”