Lift Up Your Hearts!

Who says vegetables have no feelings? That's a hug if I ever saw one.

I thought "caduceus," but Siamese twins is another possiblity. All body parts were intact; unfortunately, I was unable to separate them without damage.

Heartless omnivore that I am, after my unsuccessful surgery, I ate them.

They were delicious.

A long time ago, in a Presbyterian church far, far away....

One Sunday, when our family was working the sound booth, the pastor was expounding on the beliefs of John Calvin and of Charles Hodge. Our young children, safely hidden from congregational eyes, were sprawled out of sight, half dozing, as they awaited the end of the sermon.

But they weren't sleeping, as evidence by they rapidity with which they shot up, eyes wide open, when the pastor raised his voice in the triumphant proclamation,

I stand with Calvin and Hodge!

Suddenly the sermon, and their pastor, had become a lot more interesting.

I found it odd that the congregation did not laugh. Maybe, because they were familiar with Charles Hodge, they were less susceptible to mis-hearing the name.

At the beginning of the Gospel reading in church last Sunday, the congregation didn't laugh either. But I know that I heard what I heard, because Porter did, too, and laughed along with me. Quietly—I like to think subtly—but we did laugh. Wouldn't you if this were the image that came into your mind?

The reader really did put an extra "D" in Luke 17:12.

Happy Columbus Day!

In my heart, Columbus Day is always October 12, no matter what the calendar says. It's a better day, anyway, because we get mail today, and we didn't Monday.

If you don't think Columbus Day is worth celebrating, feel free to have a miserable day. Or not. Your choice.

The idea that those who criticize Fauci are inherently on the right is insane and really makes the left look like a bunch of baboons, frankly, and you know, we're not—not all of us.

I think both left and right can smile at that. It is one of my favorite quotes in this excerpt from DarkHorse Podcast #143, though it's just one small part. The larger topic is the capture of our most venerable institutions, such as journalism, academia, and science, by ... Something. Bret and Heather don't have a name for it, but find it has become too obvious to be ignored. They leave out government, but maybe that goes without saying.  (20 minutes)

Something unusual happened in our water aerobics class.

I had fun. I had fun participating in something resembling a sport.

So what? Well, here's the big deal: I don't think that has happened since elementary school.

I loved physical activity back then. Sports, even. Soccer, kickball, dodge ball, volley ball, gymnastics, trampoline. I even enjoyed the since-much-maligned Presidents Physical Fitness test. I was one of the best in school at swarming up a rope to the ceiling. After school, the neighborhood kids played active games, usually until dark. I was reasonably strong and fit—most children were, in those days—and loved active play.

What happened? Don't say I got old, or busy, though of course I did both. Don't blame it on phones or computers; this was long before these became part of my life.

Physical activity changed. Sports changed. Most people adapted; I didn't.

Back in my day, soccer wasn't the organized sport it is today for even the youngest. We had goals, we had a ball, we had a few basic rules (e.g. "no hands"), and we had a gaggle of kids roughly organized into two "teams." What we did, what I loved, was to run madly up and down the field, trying to kick the ball into the goal. Except for goalie, there were no assigned positions; it was literally a free-for-all. No one today would deign to call it soccer. But it sure was fun.

Volleyball was similar. Again, we had two teams—their composition always changing—a net, a ball, and a few basic rules. But no assigned positions. Serving, but little setting. Just a madcap "let's hit the ball over the net." And I loved it.

For many other people, the eventual organization of sports, honing of skills, multiplication of rules and tactics, and emphasis on competition made the games more fun. The rest of us, I guess, simply dropped out, to the detriment of both our physical and our mental health.

Which is why I was so excited when our instructor suddenly decided that Thursdays would be play days. She gave us small beach balls, and paddles, and organized us very loosely in games of no recognizable sport, but which—in groups, in pairs, and individually—challenged us to use our muscles in ways we hadn't used in a long time: reaching, jumping, running; increasing our strength, agility, and hand-eye coordination—all those things that sports are good for.

Perhaps best of all, when we played together, we became people to each other, not just a group of individuals gathered for healthful exercise. We looked at each other, we made eye contact, we worked together to make sure everyone was included and benefitting.

I was a kid again.

The following is a Dark Horse clip about the significant increase in myopia in children, as reported in this Atlantic article. Bret and Heather have issues with the article, but confirm the myopia problem and have their own theories about it. And, at the end, about orthodontia. It's 30 minutes long—and there's a section in the middle where they spend maybe too much time on the concept of "heritability"—so if you can stand it, you may want to speed up the playback. But I highly recommend watching the video, particularly to parents who are concerned about their children's eyes and teeth. I guess that would be all parents....

As I've said before, Bret and Heather are not always right, and sometimes dangerously wrong. But they are always interesting, and impressive in their quest for truth and their willingness to follow where it leads them, regardless of the popularity of their opinions.

Our internet came back while we were at church this morning. It took much longer to be restored than power did, but I know which one is more important! I was also impressed that it came back without our intervention—we didn't even have to reboot the modem. We weren't suffering, just burning through data by using my phone as a wi-fi hot spot, so it's good to have the house wi-fi back.

Our water supply has been fine throughout, but since the beginning the city has asked residents to cut down on our water use (read: don't flush so much, take short showers, limit laundry), and we're still doing that. We have a wonderful sewage treatment program that produces water that's good for irrigation and washing cars, and it's so popular they still have to limit its use during times of drought. But these are not times of drought, and when the big storage tank is full, it is full, and the overflow goes into the Little Wekiva River. It's perfectly safe—except that the last thing the overflowing Little Wekiva needs is more water.

Here's a video Porter took early this morning, showing both that the flood waters have receded considerably and that they still have a long way to go. To reiterate: this is not our street, but a couple of blocks away.

In between all of the cleanup (which for us is a LOT less than it might have been), we've ventured out a few times: Friday, to Outback for dinner with our neighbors; Saturday morning to church to help clean up the campus (Porter), Saturday afternoon to one of our very favorite museums, the Morse in Winter Park. There we encountered our first evidence of flooding outside of our neighborhood: nothing that hindered our travel, but water was bubbling up through a manhole on one street. Today was a completely normal Sabbath, except that the choir may have spent a little more time than usual exchanging stories.

I've said for a long time—at least since Porter had a job in New Orleans after Hurrican Katrina went through—that you never know what kind of leadership you have until hard times come. It's like insurance: it doesn't matter who your company is, or what kind of policy you have—as long as you don't need to make a claim. I'm very pleased by how our local government and utilities responded in this crisis.

Since COVID isn't so much of a problem in New York City anymore, Mayor Eric Adams and New York City Health & Hospitals CEO Dr. Mitchell Katz have come up with a new way to terrorize those who must be admitted to a Big Apple hospital. At the moment, it's just three facilities: H+H/Lincoln, Metropolitan, and Woodhull Hospitals, but it's feared the contagion may spread.

If you're unfortunate enough to be admitted to one of those hospitals, keep an eye on your dinner plate.

Culturally diverse plant-based meals are now the primary dinner options for inpatients.

Don't panic, NYC residents and visitors. I'm here to reassure you that this problem is not actually new, and there are ways around it.

Back in the mid-1980's, when we moved to Florida, we were warned that our local hospital was run by Seventh-Day Adventists, and consequently meat was never on the menu. The solution, we were told, was to be sure that your doctor provided you with a prescription for meat. I have no idea if making it a prescription increased the cost of meals fifty-fold, or if any insurance plans covered it. But we were assured that the hospital honored the doctors' orders, and the kitchen staff even did a better-than-usual job of preparing the special meals.

Apparently the same work-around will be honored in New York.

 Non-plant-based options continue to be available and are offered in accordance with a patient’s prescribed diet.

Choose your doctor well.

WE HAVE POWER!

It actually took us a little while to realize that power had been restored: we have to disconnect from the grid when we connect the generator.  Given what you saw in the video in this post from yesterday, I am very impressed with Duke Energy.  It seems many of us learned a lot from the Year of the Hurricanes (2004).  The infrastruction is more robust, and better response systems are in place.  It's hard to believe we were little more than 24 hours without power.  We've now entered that blissful and blessed period when we have heightened awareness of and gratitude for the amenities we rarely otherwise contemplate.

Speaking of blessings:  We had been anticipating three days, perhaps much more, of miserable, hot, humid weather, with no air conditioning, non-working fans, and un-functional pools.  Instead, Ian brought with it a most amazing respite from the temperatures-still-in-the-90's weather of last week.  It was 63 degrees when we awoke this morning!  Now that the storm is gone, the temperatures are expected to rise again, but only to the 80's for this week and with much lower humidity, they way.

Time to get on to other work.  We're still without internet, and I don't want to overdo the phone wi-fi hotspot usage.

Having watched the sensationalized devastation caused by Hurricane Ian, and seen too much of it even in our own neighborhood, it's time for some good news.

What I love best about hurricanes is that neighbors come out and talk to each other! They're walking around, assessing the situation, they're outside cleaning up, they check in on people, they help each other ... and we re-discover that most people are really nice.

Guess what? Not one person of all those we met on our walks asked us about politics. And absolutely no one asked if we were vaccinated.

I wonder why one kind of emergency (pandemic) makes people nasty, suspicious, and exclusionary, while another (hurricane) brings out the best in us.

We lost power just after I published the last post. Here you can see why we are not expecting restoration any time soon. This is one street downhill from us, houses that back up against the Little Wekiva River, which in this storm shattered by 12 inches its previous crest record of 30'.

You can see how these people will not be expecting mail delivery today. (In theory the mail is being delivered to our zip code, but I'm not holding my breath for it.) You can see that the electrical box is not in any shape for carrying current. And if you look on both sides of the house, you can see where the Little Wekiva River is pouring into the street, aptly named Little Wekiva Road. In a previous update I was hard on the engineers who designed the expensive improvements that were supposed to fix the Little Wekiva Road problem, and I still fault them, since this road floods even during normal storms. But no road construction, no drainage improvements, can handle the sudden influx of a river that overflows its banks. I heard an official on television blaming past developers who built houses in a flood zone, and past governments that allowed it. But we've been here more than 35 years, and although the low-lying parts of the road always flooded some, it was never anything like this. The kids used to ride their bikes through the flood waters without getting wet (if they were clever), and the houses themselves never flooded. My own suspicion is that it is not past, but recent construction that has made the difference, by paving the fields that used to absorb the rainwater.

Be that as it may, a few people in our neighborhood made out badly with Ian. We are without power and internet for an indeterminant period; we have a pool enclosure screen panel to replace; and we haven't had a chance to inspect the roof for damage, but all in all we have nothing to complain about.

I had been looking forward to an enforced time when we wouldn't have much to do but sit around and read—I have just finished Brian Jacques' Martin the Warrior and am eager to devour Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying's A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century—but that time came in the middle of the night when we were trying to sleep. Now it is (almost) life-as-usual. Except a bit darker, and we both reflexively flick on the lights as we enter each room.

Ian is now officially a tropical storm. It has passed southeast of us, but still hasn't reached the coast; it's creeping along at 7 mph. "Passed" is perhaps not the right word, because this morning we are experiencing the same winds and rain we had all night. We are officially under a "tropical storm warning" instead of a "hurricane warning," but only the name has changed.

It wasn't the most peaceful of nights, but that doesn't stop us from being grateful for what sleep we had. Quick checks in the middle of the night and this morning revealed no obvious damage inside, and what little we could see of the outside (in the dark, from inside) looked pretty good. All night we heard the sounds of small branches landing on our roof; we learned long ago that they sound a lot bigger than they really are. Waving tree branches frequently set off our neighbors' motion-sensor floodlight, waking us up to let us know we still had power—not altogether a bad thing. And we received full assurance that our weather radio works just fine, producing a sound piercing enough to wake us thoroughly.

I would, however like to make a few suggestions for the service's software. (1) It is not really necessary to wake us at 3:17 to inform us of a flash flood warning until 6:15 a.m., then again at 3:25 to extend the warning to 6:30, then at 4:50 to let us know it's now in place until 6:45, and at 5:42 extend it to 8:15, and at 5:51 to tell us that the endpoint is still 8:15. We know it's going to be like that all morning; why not just say "till noon" and be done with it? (2) We want to know upgraded warnings (e.g. tropical storm to hurricane, or watch to warning) right away. Feel free to wake us up. But if you're downgrading the warning (e.g. hurricane to tropical storm), that news can wait till most people are awake. 

At the moment, we still have power, for which we are beyond thankful. There are a lot of people nearby who don't, however, and we remember that with previous hurricanes, the outages have come after the storm has passed. So we remain hopeful, but cautious.

What we don't have is internet. I'm posting this while using my phone as a mobile hotspot. Spectrum says, "An outage is affecting your Spectrum services. We're working quickly to restore your service." That notice hasn't been updated since eight o'clock last night, however.

We did get an update last night about our Cape Coral folks: significant damage to yard and porch, but the house was okay and so were they.

One of the newscasters we heard yesterday emphasized the importance of helping children feel a sense of adventure during events like this, rather than overwhelming them with adult concerns. He's right. It's up to the adults to model the calm reactions and coping skills that build resilience in children. When I was growing up, blizzards and winter power outages were fun! Clearly not for my parents, who had to deal with keeping the family safe and warm, cooking on a camp stove, worrying about frozen water pipes, and cleaning dirty cloth diapers. But they made it an adventure for us.

We remain grateful for your prayers, and to all those who expressed concern for our well-being. So far, so good.

I normally don't like watching TV coverage of hurricanes, because it is always sensationalized and apparently calculated to evoke panic.

But today was different.

We watched quite a bit of news of various channels, and I was actually impressed by the coverage I saw on our local ABC affiliate, WFTV Channel 9.  Maybe they've learned that in an era when hype and panic are in the air we breathe, the only way to get people's attention is to be calm and reasonable.

The winds are picking up a bit, though the rain is still light (at least for Florida). We both made a point of getting a shower in while we still have hot water; similarly a wash and a dishwasher load are in progress. Not that either machine is full, but it's a good instinct to keep more than normally current with cleaning at such times. The lights did flicker once while I was in the shower, so it is none too soon to get those done.

Mostly we're puttering around now; there are always things that a hurricane (like a pandemic) is a good excuse to work on. Our neighborhood was on the 6:00 news, not for what has yet happened, but for what is anticipated. There are a couple of sections that flood badly in ordinary Florida storms, and were a major disaster last hurricane. The really annoying part is that the city spent an incredible amount of money to fix the problem, and as far as I can tell it is worse than ever. As Bret Weinstein said about his beloved city of Portland, Oregon (rough paraphrase): Taxes are not theft. Taxes are the price we pay for services that we want from our government. But collecting the taxes and withholding the services—that's theft.

Anyway, so far, so good, but the eye of Ian is still far away. I keep hearing small branches fall onto our roof—may they stay small!

The other concern is tornadoes, which are often spawned by hurricanes. We've been under a Tornado Watch since 5 a.m.—may it never turn into a warning!

I just learned that we are now considered to be in the "27-inch zone" for rainfall! May it never ... you get the picture. Ian is moving s-o s-l-o-w-l-y—just 7 mph at the moment—and is expected to take eight hours to go from Kissimmee to Daytona Beach (about 75 miles). That is the crux of the problem.

We have no news about our folks in Cape Coral; we're not close enough to be on an update list, and so must get news second- or third-hand.

Unless something noteworthy happens, My next update will be in the morning.

I have been negligent in posting Hurricane Ian updates, perhaps because our preparations have been slow and methodical over time, and perhaps most of all because until recently it didn't seem to be that much of a threat to us. Now that is changed, and I find people looking here to keep an eye on us, so here we go.

This is the past and predicted path as of noon today.

It doesn't pay to fret too much about a hurricane when it's still days away, because the models always change. We thought we would be mostly in the clear because it was predicted to hit land far north of us, and at nothing worse than a Category 1. How things change over time! Now it's about to hit Cape Coral as very nearly a CAT 5, and follow Interstate 4 right across the state. Very much like Hurricane Charley, which was a CAT 1 by the time it got to us, though Charley was much smaller and moved much faster. Ian is HUGE.

We're pretty much ready, having prepared, as I said, over time. Thanks to COVID, we didn't need to make any panicked grocery store trips. We even have toilet paper. The generator works. We have gasoline for the generator and in our cars. The freezers are organized and filled with both food and frozen jugs of water. We've brought in "flight risk" items from outside and our back porch, including the picnic table—you never know. Porter climbed on the roof to bring down our wind chimes. We have batteries; our phones, power blocks, and computers are charged. We've lowered the water level of the pool to accommodate the coming rain. Oh, yes, I still have to make my customary walk through the house taking pre-hurricane pictures. As soon as I post this.

Did I mention rain? We have had light rain off and on all day; we started feeling Ian's effects yesterday, well before landfall. We've had weeks of rain, so the ground is already totally saturated, leaving little room for the "up to 24 inches" expected before Ian is done with us. I'm grateful that our big trees are live oaks, which have deep and sturdy roots! They also tend to protect us by breaking up the wind. On the other hand, they have branches that may or may not stand up to the winds that we are expecting. I'd much rather have the trees than not; we're also counting on our abundant foliage to help protect our windows from flying debris.

Flooding is a big concern here, but not for us, as long as we don't want to go anywhere. We live on what passes for a hill in this part of Florida, though the rest of you might not even notice the elevation change.

That's about it for us, for now. I'll try to check in here occasionally, to keep loved ones updated and for my own records. The center of Ian is expected to arrive mid-morning tomorrow, but the serious effects will begin much sooner; indeed they have already started not far from here. As I said, just light rain for us, but some places in Central Florida are already without power, having seen some significant winds.

Right now I'm more concerned for our friends in Cape Coral. The first predicted path I saw showed the then-unnamed storm coming ashore there as a hurricane, but after that the forecast changed radically to the north. Turns out the original prognosticator was the better one.