Walking after Ida

To reassure my brother in Japan, I will say, “We are still here.” Apparently yesterday was a slow news day and Weather Channel addicts especially may have gotten the idea that “Hurricane” Ida was actually a major and dangerous storm. A client of my husband’s in Puerto Rico called to check on our welfare, and later my brother in Oregon also checked in. Last night the local Jim Cantore wannabes interrupted our regularly scheduled programming for hurricane coverage so often and at such length that we entirely lost the thread of the plot.

The Board of Education closed the schools for two days (no doubt deeply regretting that they’d let the kids take their “hurricane makeup days” as “Fall Break” a few weeks ago), the City closed offices and departments (including the library) and canceled garbage pickup (already scheduled to be skipped tomorrow, Veterans Day) and took down the hanging flower baskets (sensibly enough, and at least they didn’t bother to take up the bedded plants), the local emergency management agency opened a shelter.

I don’t know whether there was a run on grocery stores for batteries, bread, milk, and eggs or not, but when I went to the ABC Beverage store yesterday afternoon for a routine whiskey purchase, the clerks there confirmed they’d been doing a land-office business.

All this despite the fact that by late afternoon yesterday it appeared pretty clear that Ida was weakening and was not going to pose much of a threat to anyone except those in very low-lying areas (a voluntary evacuation was declared for waterfront property owners).

It was quite breezy yesterday morning (more so, I venture to say, than at any time after the storm actually made landfall), and it started sprinkling just as I was about to go out for a walk. It continued to rain and blow off and on all day and through the night, but the rain gauge this morning (after the storm had passed and the rain had stopped) showed just 3¼ inches. To put this in perspective, we had 2¼ inches during a 24-hour period twice in October.

When I got up this morning, I looked out the window, curious to see what the storm had produced in the way of “derbis” (a “family word” we picked up from a friend). The back yard was scattered with dead wood (thoroughly rotten and scabby) and a few of what my husband calls “giblets” (small live branches, with leaves, ripped off by the wind). So yes, there’ll be a little cleanup. But that’s often true after run-of-the-mill storms. This was definitely no biggie. If we’re lucky, though, perhaps it brought down the last of the pine straw and most of the rest of the abundant acorns.

My husband and I dithered about exercise—hit the street or go to “the gym“? I opted for the outdoors, while he took off for the indoor track. When I returned, he said, “You made the right choice.” (Sure enough, the Christian Life Center was still closed, and he ended up running outside after all.)

It was the right decision. The temperature was brisk (mid-60s), and a fresh breeze added wind chill, so I made record time, pushing hard to warm up. And my trip around the neighborhood confirmed that no one had suffered even moderate damage. Although garbage pickup had been canceled, a city garbage crew were roaming around looking for “derbis”—or perhaps just looking for any downed limbs that might be blocking streets. If so, they weren’t finding anything.

Bottom line: a non-event, and if we can just hang on for 20 more days, we can finish this hurricane season without a single hurricane. I don’t think anyone here will object to that!

Walking Through Soup

Because the Methodist church “gym” where I have been exercising on weekdays is not open on Sundays, I had no choice but to walk outside, so I was viewing the weather with more interest than usual. Although the forecast for today was for rain, the sun had put in a tentative appearance at daybreak. Not long thereafter, however, the skies darkened and there followed a very small shower (so slight that areas of the street under trees were still dry).

When I was ready to hit the street, it was still looking like rain, and in fact a few scattered drops were still falling—nothing to deter a determined walker with a broad-brimmed sunhat, however. Not long after I turned the corner, though, it began to rain in earnest. Still not a deterrent: in fact, the moisture was a lot pleasanter falling than when it had been hovering around like a thick soup. It even promised to drop the temperature a little.

Then, about two-thirds of the way through my walk, the rain stopped. The clouds parted, the sun came fiercely out, and the streets began to steam, creating the Turkish bath effect we here on the Gulf Coast know so well. Fortunately, a mild breeze picked up, out of the south so it was blowing full in my face, and this helped a little (at least until I turned the corner onto my street).

Earlier this week we had a slight cooling trend, with lows in the mid-60s instead of the high 70s (though daytime highs were still hitting well over 90). Now we’re back to our typical August misery. But never let it be said that our weather lacks variety!

Rain in the Desert

It’s been very dry here lately, and the vegetation was looking alarmingly brown. All last week the forecasters kept promising rain (at least a slight chance) and cooler temperatures toward the end of the week, but it continued dry, with heat indexes ranging up to 110. On Saturday and Sunday my husband’s amateur radio club held its annual Field Day—when it “always rains”—without a drop.

Yesterday afternoon, however, we finally got the promised rain—a total of about an inch, heavy at times—with the result that it was a trifle cooler this morning than it had been in weeks. My husband and I have been going to “the gym” to exercise because it’s just too hot and humid outside to run/walk, but today I decided to hit the street instead. One factor was that my husband’s car was parked behind mine, blocking me in, and he wasn’t ready to leave yet. In addition, however, the last couple of times I’ve exercised at the fitness center I’ve been distracted by a woman talking loudly on her cell phone, so a solitary walk around the neighborhood seemed more appealing than the elliptical machine and wonky treadmill, especially since it was overcast and still fairly pleasant out.

And in fact it was not bad. The sun didn’t even try to come back out until just as I was returning to the house, and the air was not too oppressive, even though there was no appreciable breeze. In addition, for the last half of the distance I had some unexpected evaporation cooling from a rather wet T-shirt.

Despite the overcast, I hadn’t really expected rain, but of course the fun aspect of “scattered showers” is that they can be quite unexpected. As I climbed Fels Avenue approaching Summit, I felt a few drops, and as I turned the corner onto Summit, they began to pick up speed. Within the next block, I was into a pretty heavy downpour.

My hat kept the rain off my glasses, and it really felt pretty refreshing, so I plodded on (what other choice did I have, anyway?), planning to take shelter, if necessary, under the overhang in front of a row of shops in the next block. But as I crossed St. James Avenue, the rain suddenly stopped. Well, of course, it didn’t stop, as I could look back and see heavy rain still coming down behind me, but I had walked out from under that particular cloud.

The irony of it was that the cloud was parked over the stretch my husband and I call The Desert, the broad street/parking lot behind the K–1 Center where there is usually no shade at all. So of the entire 2.1-mile extent of my route, it was raining only in The Desert.

Open Windows

The past couple of weeks have been one of those brief idyllic periods in Fairhope when it is neither too cool nor too warm to leave the windows and doors open. It’s been so pleasant to have the fresh breezes and to hear the birds singing (as well as roofers hammering on a neighbor’s roof, lawn service workers using their gasoline-powered blowers, etc.), but now it seems to be over.

Today it’s hard to realize that it was only a couple of weekends ago that I felt it was finally safe to remove the winter blanket (heavy electric) and put on the summer one (lightweight cotton thermal), but Friday was quite warm, and yesterday it was so muggy that I finally threw in the towel and turned on the air conditioning. Even though I set the thermostat at 80°, the compressor immediately came on and cranked its little heart out all day.

Last night, when it was 86° in our bedroom and (nominally) in the low 70s outside, I tried opening a window, but there was no discernible difference in temperature, so I ended up closing it again and reluctantly nudging the thermostat down to 78°. Twelve hours later, the temperature in the bedroom is down to 84° (thank goodness for ceiling fans!).

We’ll probably have a cool snap sometime before summer really sets in (traditionally, the first weekend in May is chilly, but that didn’t happen this year), but I doubt that it will last long enough to make it practical to open the windows again; for that we’ll have to wait for those magical few weeks in the fall when conditions are “just right.”

One reason I hate closing the windows is that we lose the benefit of any breezes that may be going (though this becomes less and less of an issue as the season progresses). The conditioned air, though drier and thereby “cooler,” is stagnant; even with ceiling fans circulating in almost every room, it’s not the same as having cross-ventilation between windows.

We’ll adjust, though, and I have to say that when I came home from my walk today, dripping with sweat (79° out, with humidity to match), it was really pleasant to step inside and feel a noticeable chill!

Our Fickle Weather

About a month ago I wrote that the fickleness of our weather makes it hard to become acclimated to the cold. Several times since then I’ve been tempted to post a follow-up citing actual temperatures to prove that I did not exaggerate. For example, on the day after I wrote that, it was 36° when I got up at 4:30 a.m. and (according to the thermometer in my car) 34° when I hit the road for Greenville at 6 a.m. It did eventually warm up some that day—the high (as registered by the thermometer over the furnace, so I’m always dubious about it) was 61°—and just two days later it was 52° when I got up, with a high of 72°.

According to a friend, last week our temperatures averaged 10 degrees below the average for the dates and this week 10 degrees above. We’ve definitely had a lot of fluctuation. On the theory that “a picture is worth a thousand words,” however, I present the graph below to illustrate what I am talking about. As you can guess, the red line represents the daily high and the blue line the low. I rest my case.

Walking (not singing, certainly not dancing) in the Rain

Yesterday was definitely not a day for walking. When I came home from my ballet class around 10 a.m., it was nasty out—cold, very windy, not actually raining but looking as if it might at any moment.

When I walked in the door, my husband was just stepping out of the shower. I said, “I guess you don’t plan to run today,” this implied comment on the weather being prefatory to telling him I didn’t think it was the ideal time to go look for a Christmas tree as we had planned. Before I had a chance to follow up, however, he said, “I’ll be ready in just a few minutes.”

I said I thought today would be a better day (it would have been). He said there would be less time today (he had commitments in Mobile this morning).

I said, “Think Stonehenge,” referring to our miserable hour at that godforsaken historic site last March—on an unseasonably freezing day with heavy rain and gale-force winds. He said, “It wasn’t that bad.” Ah, the blessings of rose-colored memory!

I said if he insisted on going, he could be sure that I would pick the first tree we laid eyes on. He was unmoved.

It had started to sprinkle by the time we left the carport. By the time we reached the Christmas tree farm, it was raining pretty hard. Areas at our latitude to the west of us (Houston, New Orleans, coastal Mississippi) got snow yesterday, but no, we had to get rain as the snow blew into North Alabama and bypassed us.

All the trees looked very far away. We usually get a Leyland cypress, but the only ones we saw claimed to be “Mostly 9–12 feet” (we have an 8½-foot ceiling). The Virginia pines were closer, so we decided one of those would do.

I would have liked to pick the first one we came to, but it was too tall. Others were too short. Some were obviously hideous. By the time we found one we were both desperate enough to settle for, we were a long way from the “shaking and bagging” area and pay point—and soaking wet. We cut the tree, loaded it on the cart, and lugged it back.

The owner of the farm, who had undoubtedly thought no one would be crazy enough to go tree shopping on such a wretched day, came out to shake and bag the tree himself and then to complain about the inadequacy of my roof rack (which has sufficed in three previous years and in fact bore this tree home safely as well).

The perfect way to get into the holiday spirit!

Will Power Weather

You folks in/from the Frozen North can snigger all you like (and, yes, you Midwestern snowbirds, I’m talking to you; I’ve seen you out there in your Bermuda shorts), but when the temperature dips below 50° here on the Gulf Coast, especially when the wind is agitating the treetops as it was today, it takes more grit than I can always muster to get me out on the street. It’s so much easier to stay comfortably inside in my flannel nightgown and quilted bathrobe. (In my defense, I have to say that the fickleness of our weather is certainly a factor: when it is 70° one day and 40° the next—I do not exaggerate—we don’t get much chance to acclimate ourselves, and I’m constantly debating what is the ideal attire for today’s outing.) But I did finally go out today—after noon, when the thermometer finally registered 51° or so.

I can’t really say I enjoyed it much. The sun was warm, but the air was still quite chilly, and the wind was cruel. Even though the rest of me warms up quite satisfactorily with the exertion, my hands are still like ice. Partly this is because I have yet to find a pair of gloves that are both heavy enough to be worthwhile and thin and flexible enough to allow me to operate the buttons on my watch, so I was bare-handed.

Aside from the wind and cold, however, it was a glorious day, with a cloudless sky. One can’t help noticing that the holiday season has officially begun. The trees downtown are swathed in strings of miniature lights, and last night was the official “Lighting of the Trees,” which will continue to be lit up at night at least through Mardi Gras. As I walked, I noticed several piles of white powder that had a distinctive cotton candy smell. Given the temperature, I didn’t linger for further analysis, but wild speculation suggested perhaps some kind of fire ant poison heavily laced with sugar? But why now, and why in such widely dispersed locations? A mystery I’ll have to pursue another time, I suppose.

Tomorrow morning I have to be up well before the crack of dawn to leave for a morning meeting several hours up the interstate, so I won’t be walking, which is just as well because the weatherman says it’s going to get very cold tonight (possible hard freeze—I noticed several neighbors had flung sheets over their delicate plants). Sunday is supposed to be milder, which I hope is the case, since it is the day of Fairhope’s annual Open House, when most of the downtown merchants throw open their stores and serve refreshments to all comers in the hope of enticing them to buy. It is the official opening of the Christmas shopping season, and nice weather would be a boon for the shopkeepers in these uncertain economic times.

October’s Bright Blue Weather

When I was in junior high school, “morning announcements” were broadcast to homeroom classes over the P.A. (public address system or intercom), as I believe is still true (at least in U.S. public schools). The announcements were made, however, not by students, as I believe is common nowadays, but by the assistant principal, a man who was not well liked (because he was also in charge of “discipline,” he was regarded more as an adversary than a friend).

Even though I can now acknowledge that we were at an age when no adult can do anything right, some of his actions still seem cringeworthy, as when, on St. Patrick’s Day, he would begin the announcements by intoning, with careful enunciation suggesting anything but an Irish accent, “Top o’ the mornin’ to ye,” giving “ye” the full benefit of a long vowel (as in “ye olde”).

But the groaning really started when, on some beautiful day in October, he would read us the poem “October’s Bright Blue Weather.” I’ve long since forgotten any of the verses of this poem, but the refrain “October’s bright blue weather” is seared in my brain and comes unbidden on such a day as today.

After torrential rain all day last Thursday and a couple of days of overcast lasting well into midday, yesterday morning and today have dawned cloudless, with a sky that, by the time I went out for my walk, was a brilliant robin’s egg blue (I suppose it would be more apt and accurate to describe it as “cerulean blue,” but that seems self-referential). It is the sort of day that makes one glad to be alive and out of doors (despite the chill and quite a stiff breeze), and I can’t help agreeing with Helen Hunt Jackson:

O SUNS and skies and clouds of June,
     And flowers of June together,
Ye cannot rival for one hour
     October’s bright blue weather;

Goodbye, Gustav

Yesterday my brother in Japan emailed me to say that he’d been following my blog to find out whether he needed to be worried about us with regard to Gustav. “If you don’t post tomorrow, of course, I will assume the worst!” he wrote. In my reply, I pointed out that if I couldn’t walk, I’d have nothing (theoretically) to post about.

Indeed, I haven’t walked today, and although I have postponed posting until it seemed the storm was “over,” Gustav has not provided much fodder one way or another. As expected, its effects were felt mostly west of here, and fortunately New Orleans seems to have been spared the brunt of it, and even Morgan City, Louisiana, doesn’t seem to have been brutally impacted by the storm, which had been downgraded to Category 2 by the time it made landfall around midday today.

Here we’ve had some wind and some rain. My husband just emptied the rain gauge; it was filled up to the last calibration mark, which is at 5″, so we have already gotten more rain than from T.D. Fay. As for the wind, we have no anemometer, but my husband’s criterion is the number of “giblets” of oak tree we have blown down in the back yard—bunches of foliage torn off by the wind. Even an ordinary heavy rain will bring down dead wood, but it takes a pretty strong wind to rip off these small branches of live foliage, and there are essentially none today.

We were very aware of the rain “bands.” Although I’d hoped for a rainy, windy night (good for sleeping), the first rain arrived about 6 a.m. It has continued off and on all day. Whenever it cleared enough to encourage us to go out for a walk (me) or run (my husband), we would turn around and find it raining again, often with heavy rain blown sideways by the wind. So I haven’t been out, even to reconnoiter (I suppose I could go out in the car, but that seems like cheating).

I haven’t done much else, either. The worst thing about these storms is the combination of restlessness and lethargy they engender. This is especially noticeable when there’s an actual threat. And of course when we lose power, there’s an excuse for goofing off. I’ve had no such excuse today, yet I’ve still accomplished little. Admittedly, it’s a holiday (Labor Day in the United States), but that doesn’t mean I don’t have work to do. Since I’m also a procrastinator of the first rank, however, I’ve managed to rationalize putting it off till tomorrow (it helps that I did a lot of tomorrow’s work yesterday, in a fit of similar restlessness).

I should mention that the effects of the storm have not been entirely unnoticeable here. Some of the effects that we would really not have predicted were these:

1.    It being the end of the month, my husband made it a point to write checks to pay all the bills before we went out for milk yesterday so we could take them to the post office on the way (even though we know they won’t go out till Tuesday, it seemed prudent to get them that far while we could). When we got there (about 2 p.m.), we found the post office lobby closed. I suspect the USPS will get some uncomfortable feedback from boxholders who couldn’t access their post office boxes because the post office had been secured against the storm.

2.    At 2 p.m. yesterday, our local public radio station stopped playing classical music and switched over to the audio feed from the local television station with which they partner (which of course had preempted all regular programming in order to cover the storm). Since all listeners within their broadcast area surely still had power and could have gotten this same audio and video from the television station itself, this seemed like overkill. Presumably WHIL had to let their staff go, but this was just insane.

3.    Coverage of the storm on the Weather Channel was interrupted by the “morons” (my husband’s term) at our local cable system, who broke into useful programming to put up DOS-style screens announcing local tornado warnings (instead of just using a crawl at the bottom of the screen).

Well, I guess that’s it from here for now—back to normal tomorrow!

Fay Fizzles

Well, I didn’t expect to be able to get out for a walk this morning, and in fact I didn’t walk, though in truth I could have. When the radio came on at 6, I looked at the sliver of gray sky visible through the high windows in our bedroom and rolled over and went back to sleep. At 6:30 I did get up, and when I went out for the paper, it was obvious there had been rain in the night: water was standing in the dip at the end of our driveway, and the paper was double-bagged and tied, with water droplets on the outside. But it wasn’t actually raining, though the streets were wet and the overcast skies didn’t look encouraging, and in fact it didn’t start to rain till 8, so I could theoretically have fit in my 40-minute walk.

But I didn’t. Instead, I tucked into breakfast and the (dry) Press-Register, whose main headline, “Fickle Fay,” sums it up. Sure enough, T.S. Fay, now downgraded to a tropical depression, has veered north of us and is inundating central Alabama instead of the coast. It’s raining pretty hard here now (after 9:30), but the prediction is that we’ll probably get only an inch or so of rain, far less than the four inches being forecast last night, much less the 12-inch deluge that was earlier feared, causing the City of Mobile to open shelters and the University of Mobile to shut down for the weekend, sending resident students home (actions that both struck me as overreaction even at the time).

Elsewhere in the paper, Frances Coleman writes about the danger of becoming blasé about storms, but it does seem inevitable when every storm is blown out of proportion by wolf-crying media, not least of which is the Weather Channel, whose business model depends on severe weather. I worry, though, about the long-term effects of triggering everyone’s “fight or flight” response numerous times every summer. This kind of emotional stress can’t be good for us in the long run.