Oh, and about that stuff I complained about earlier. Nevermind.
Fall '04
One thing that turned out not be as bad as I was expecting is the humid weather. When I made my scouting trip in January, even the locals told me summer was miserably hot. Friends in Boulder warned me that I would hate the
humidity. I didn't find it to be all that bad. Maybe I have a sweat fetish. But I find it easier to get cool when it's hot than warm when it's cold, though I gotta admit I do love the cold better.
The summer weather worked out great for me. Don't mean to be unsympathetic with the horrendous weather damage millions of people in the southeast have had to put up with, and since we are just half way through the hurricane season, I may be bragging a little hastily. I had never been through a hurricane, and I thought Charley was a gas! Course Charley was barely a hurricane when it came through Myrtle Beach, so I got to see what it's like without suffering anything more substantial than lost power for a few hours. The governor [Note to myself. I guess since I live here now I ought to find out who the governor is] did issue a mandatory evacuation order, but hey, no way I was going to skip out on my first hurricane unless it was category four or more. It's better in real life than on TV. The satellite image shows storm bands spreading out from the eye and I really did not take that as an accurate depiction. But they look like bands of clouds from below too! [Yeh, I know, I am pretty easy to entertain.] I knew about the eye of hurricanes as a fact, but the experience is different than I pictured in one respect. As the hurricane approaches the storm bands get stronger and stronger. As the eye passes by, it does get nice and quiet, even some blue sky. What had not really sunk in ahead of time is that when the eye passes, you start out in the strongest band. Standing out side, you can see it coming and suddenly...bam. So anyway, that was fun and informative. Trees down here and there, signs blown apart, nothing major.
Ivan wasn't much when it came through here. But Lordy it did rain some. Jenne just slid by to our west day before yesterday. We were on the southeast side, so we didn't get much rain. Full moon and high tide when I went down to the beach, and the storm surge pretty much ignored the "Keep off the Dunes" signs. The wind gust were just strong enough to stop you in midstride walking into it and make you stagger a step or to when it was at your back. I remember writing earlier that I would never again feel the sting of wind driven snow on my face. Except for the frostbite danger, that was a piece of cake compared to wind driven sand. Ouch! Worse yet my torso and legs were bare so the wind had a bigger target. Another difference is that the snow melts, but when I got home I was covered with a fine layer of sand, even got under my shorts and on my teeth.
Had a few fun memory jogs this summer. I was walking by an outside display table at the nearest thing we have to a gourmet grocer when I saw a pile of grape shaped fruit, only bigger. So I asked the vendor, are those muscadines? I am quite certain I have not heard or used that word in more then fifty years. And I remembered the smell and taste just like I had been eating them yesterday. They are quite tasty and it was really fun to be doing something that seemed so vividly familiar. I had forgotten that muskadine skin does a pretty good job of imitating leather. Later, I even remembered that we kids believed that if you swallowed the seeds, they could swell up and bust your stomach.
Getting ready to take a trip through western NC next week to see the fall colors. I haven't seen the Great Smokey Mountains since I was a small child. Really looking forward to that to put my recent bout of homesickness in perspective. My feelings about the Smokies in comparison to the Rockies is best captured by a hillbilly song. A fellow lost his love and now has met someone promising... "it ain't love, but it ain't bad."
Back to Blogish Gallimaufry Table of Contents
