November 9, 1989
It’s not unusual for me to skip a day or two posting to the blog lately, but I have a really good excuse for missing yesterday. Hurricane Zeta knocked out power to my neighborhood, and it remained out for almost 24 hours. That’s not bad. Hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps a million and more, are still without. Actually, it was Tropical Storm Zeta when it arrived on my doorstep, but this nasty little cyclone exceeded expectations everywhere it went. It was predicted to be a Category 1 storm when it came ashore south of New Orleans. Instead it was a distinct Category 2. It was expected to peter out rather quickly once it advanced inland, becoming a mere tropical depression almost immediately. That did not happen. It maintained tropical storm-force winds across the southeast, well into northwest Georgia. I can’t complain. I lost one already-dicey windowpane and spent much of Thursday picking up sticks in the yard. I’m good with that. A late-October hurricane is not unheard of, but they’re not common either. And there are 30 more days left in hurricane season. Don’t bet against 2020!
50 responses to “The Torch Is Past”
Glad you made it through with nothing worse than that, Jimmy. Let’s hope that is all that comes ashore for the rest of the year. I can recall some late season storms moving through Tuscaloosa due to hurricanes. The tornadoes are bad enough. I’ve been enjoying your Indiana Arlo series as well.
Glad you’re safe
So I signed up another marathon on Sunday near Cleveland. Forecast is 46°at the start but winds pushing down to 40° at the finish. It may be similar to Boston in 2017, but hopefully not as bad. I wish that it was remnants from Zeta as usually there is wind and rain but the temperature is warmer. I can drop out at the halfway point. We will see. Kind of disappointing.
I am glad that you are safe Jimmy and glad that you have power.
JJ– “Don’t bet against 2020!” As someone on the radio said, “This year has been the longest decade of my life!”
Here’s something beautiful:
https://vimeo.com/473193668
Seeing that in person is my biggest remaining bucket list item! The good news is the season for the best views is during the fall and spring with auroras being most common then.
Wow! That was awesome!
Oklahoma and others had an ice storm knocking down lines apparently. We didn’t, just cold rain. There were photos of electric company volunteers half coming here, half to Gulf Coast.
Apparently ice storm and hurricanes don’t often occur together.
We had the remnants of Zeta yesterday and last night and then it sucked in colder air from the north. It’s been steady snow here in coastal MA (inland too) all morning. It’s barely sticking but I can’t remember when we last had snow in October! Crazy weather. I feel bad for you folks in Louisiana and surrounding states getting hit with one hurricane after another. You can’t catch a break.
Jackie– family and friends in OKC have been without power for a few (4, think so far) days. At least it is warming up a bit. One sister moved into her RV with propane heat and a generator during the outage. The other sister has a small generator connected to the fridge and the furnace.
I was about to post something similar to what Bonnie from Gloucester said, being in the same general area, but she beat me to it, so I’ll go on to the other thing I was going to say, which is about the strip:
My grandfather, living near Harvard Square in Cambridge, absolutely loved burning leaves. He missed it dreadfully when Cambridge outlawed outdoor fires, so when he visited us on my (other side of my family) grandmother’s farm in Virginia, we had bags of leaves for him to burn. After he died, we started having the Fred Stone Memorial Leaf Fire on the Friday evening after Thanksgiving (weather permitting). No idea if it’s happening this year…
My late mother and her sisters loved to burn leaves and dead branches. We had lots of both since most of giant pecans were at least 100 years old. They would get together and spend a couple weeks together in the fall picking up pecans and cleaning the yard of more than one acre surrounding the farm house.
I called home late one fall day and cousin/child answering phone said “Aunt Polly and Aunt Blondell are on the cookhouse shed raking leaves off for Aunt Kit and Aunt Erie to burn.” The youngest was late 60s and oldest mid 80s. The cookhouse is at least 180 years old and very derelict and flameable.
The pyramaniacs are all deceased now but I miss them.all. Yes, the cartoon made me think of them.
Ghost — Yesterday at a major grocery store I beheld a young lady whose appearance took my breath away. Everyone else had been wearing sweaters or jackets just an hour before, but here she was, about 6 feet tall, lightly tanned, hair in a ponytail, and wearing her requisite mask, a barely modest black sports bra, black spandex shorts, and running shoes. Could you estimate percentages for me? BTW, the shorts resembled these (I hope this opens!):
https://i0.wp.com/ae01.alicdn.com/kf/HTB1NAlLKFXXXXaHXVXXq6xXFXXXd/Low-Waist-Womens-Nylon-Stretch-font-b-Metallic-b-font-font-b-Dance-b-font-font.jpg
Based on the photo of the shorts and the description of the sports bra, I’d estimate the young lady in question was at least 75% naked. It’s hard to actually do the math without the empirical evidence in front of me. 🙂 Even without it, I’d hazard a guess that the YLIQ could definitely put the “treat” into “trick-or-treat”.
I’m not that good at estimating such things, but you’re right about her being a treat to have seen. Ah… to be 40 years younger and in a far more impressive body than I’ve ever had! At my tallest I was never over 5′ 10.5″ or had any particular athletic skills. That’s part of why my yearbook shows me only in the band and as a member of a couple of clubs.
Re the 10-30-20 real-time cartoon: Someone notify Travelocity that Arlo found their Roaming Gnome.
Ever think about moving farther inland, Jimmy?
Sean Connery dead at 90.
I am depressed. All my favorite musicians are dead or dying. Ditto actors.
Who next? Keith Richards and Betty White?
Jackie, I mean this is the nicest way possible: I am not entirely sure Keith Richards CAN die. I mean . . . he seems to have some major mojo going there, that’s propping him up from the inside. It just might be that he discovered that magic formula we were all looking for in the 60s. Even if they say he’s passed at some point, I just know we’re going to catch sight of him in various back-up bands, a shade among the stacked amps.:-)
As a youngster I used to love the smell of burning leaves. Then we had to put them in plastic bags. Now only paper -degradable- bags or in barrels to be picked up by trucks.
Glad to hear you made it into the clear, Jimmy.
I don’t usually bother to rake the leaves due to the size of our yard and for other reasons, but I have been known to gather enough up just to enjoy a burn pile. 😉 Paying (directly or through your taxes) to haul them away makes absolutely no sense to me. Mow them into the lawn if you don’t like to look at them. The nutrients in those leaves are the trees of tomorrow.
That was my thought. Either add them to your compost heap, or use them to start one. Now that I know better, I wonder why my father (thrifty soul that he was) let the gardener dump all of the grass clippings and other garden waste in the trash, then pay for fertilizer every few years. We had room on the side of the house to compost it, but never did.
Loving the ‘Arlo Jones’ series!
RIP Sir Thomas Sean Connery
1930 – 2020
As I told Jackie, I was thinking of him just days ago due to the current A&J arc and his role as Indiana Jones’s father in the film franchise.
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The Best Bond — R.I.P.
What Ghost didn’t say was I had also been thinking of Sean Connery with the the Indy fantasy and how beautifully he had aged. He looked better than anyone I’ve seen in a kilt even in his 80s.
But I specifically loved he was still so sexy as Indy’s father that he got the girl before Indy. Which is what I mentioned.
One of my favorite bits of dialogue in any film…
Indiana Jones: “It’s disgraceful, you’re old enough to be her…her grandfather.”
Professor Henry Jones: “Well, I’m as human as the next man.”
Indiana Jones: “Dad, I *was* the next man.”
Professor Henry Jones: “Oh…ships that pass in the night.”
We have had a busy Halloween! We’re one of the few in this area with the usual decorations up… and my daughters chose the top end of a tree I toppled to stand in a bucket and hang little snack bags of treat on: A Halloween Tree! They’ve had to restock it numerous times. When they shut things down at 9 pm they will have fewer than a dozen bags left.
Weirdly the Indy Arlo arc made my mind wander to the film noir classics Pulp Fiction and Kiss Me Deadly which feature a glowing golden brief case and a glowing box that hold an unknown force of immense value
Was this representative of the Ark of the Covenant sought by Indiana Jones in the movie? Only darker and more complex?
My Halloween reading!
I was huge Mickey Spillane fan in 1950s hardly appropriate reading age 8-12 when I preferred Spillane to Nancy Drew.
The film “Repo Man”* featured a 1968 Chevy Malibu with a bright, unearthly, and deadly force that emanated from its trunk when opened.
*In the interest of full-disclosure, a much-younger-and-much-less-concerned-for-his-personal-safety** Ghost did a stint as an automobile repo man, where he acquired skills that would have transferred well had he decided to pursue a career in Grand Theft Auto. Good times, good times.
**Some people get more than a little incensed when someone shows up to take away their vehicle. In fairness, the majority of them would surrender it peacefully…it wasn’t like they didn’t know the payments were a 120 or more days past due.
I never knew you had been a repo man. I spent a few years working for ADT Automotive Remarketing, who tried to turn repo’s into a one-stop shop. They had a large network of auto auctions nationwide and started contracting with major banks and auto finance companies to handle repos, cleaning up the cars and selling them off. The idea was to increase the number of cars going through their auctions while relieving these finance companies of the burden of contracting their own repo work. It was ok, but what I like best was getting moved to the skip trace department. These were the folks who often committed outright fraud or took out the loan without the intent of paying it back and then went to extraordinary lengths to hide themselves and the vehicle. Tracking them down was often a real challenge and great mental stimulation for me.
When I was working with the Southern states floral and ribbon salesmen trying to manage to teach them to sell and run a sales territory one of my salesmen in Mississippi was a repo man. Literally moonlighting. It paid well, better than working.
Seven salesmen (half the sales force were given choice of working with me or being fired. Some chose firing. The repo man didn’t wa t to be accountable and decided he’d rather face guns and violence then me.