Florida Bulletin

How things change; for the past thirty years the only weather phenomena that I have cared about have been tornadoes in the summer and ice storms in the winter. Now I’m a Florida resident and it’s late August and out there in the Atlantic Ocean, just north of San Juan PR, is a hurricane, whimsically named Dorian, presumably by a fan of Oscar Wilde, and it is inexorably approaching the Florida coast.  They tell us that is now a Category I beast but there’s a whole lot of warm Atlantic water between there and here which could pump it up to a Cat lII beast by the time it slams onto the east coast.

As you can imagine the TV meteorological guys are in their element, surrounded by giant screens displaying trajectories that the eye of the storm might (big might) follow and where it will hit. The best that they can say now is anywhere between Miami and Jacksonville or even up in Georgia which makes their algorithms no better than Old Moore’s Almanac, but they keep trying. And once it arrives five miles out, their solutions and Old Moore’s will be coincident.

This is my first hurricane and it’s something akin to the imminent birth of a first child. You know that it will happen, but you don’t know when. Well-meaning friends and relatives give you advice; the governor has told us to buy in supplies for 7 days. My response has been to have a couple of cases of my favorite tipple delivered. Maybe I will also get in some bottled water and some cans of beans and candles. My worst dread is that the power fails and the ice maker ceases operation—what will my Negroni do then, poor thing!

Bah, Humbug Dorian, your getting old!