Personal
Special Place in Hell
Public Service Announcement.
I have a pretty decent spam filtering process, but no process is 100% and I will still get the occasional BAD email, as follows.
The first screen shot shows the message as it appears in my inbox and is pretty legit looking…. although the use of French in the fine print is a clue. The second screen shot shows the senders full email…. “noreply@pphoki.me” is probably not an actual Disney email server. The last screen shot is what the website looks like and shows the full address in the address bar, yes I used a private browser to access the site. There is a special place in hell for these kinds of criminals.
A very special place.
Twister Twister Twister
So. That was something a little different. Last Friday morning, Tallahassee was hit with a very strong storm front that came on very fast, that isn’t the new part. The front produced tornadoes, that isn’t completely new either, we are used to Hurricanes but we get occasional twisters also. What was new, was there were three of them all in the span of about an hour and all isolated mostly in the South part of the city. When you live in Florida you understand the destruction that low pressure fast winds can make. You pray for minimal damage, no serious injuries (or deaths) and cope with the loss of power get to cleaning things up. This was different.
Tallahassee is a very beautiful tree loving city… we are kinda famous for our canopy roads. We tend to even build sidewalks around the trees instead of cutting them down. While that does make living here like living in a forest, it does come with downsides when big storms hit. This one was bad. It took down so many trees and with it power lines and poles. The City Utilities reported that the damage was worse than the last three hurricanes to land in the area combined. Those crews, along with neighboring counties and states lending their crews, have been working non stop to restore power to so many people.
We were fortunate to have minimal damage to the trees near our house, bunch of small limbs, a few big ones but nothing too bad. We will need a utility crew to take care of a large limb resting on our power line to the house, but we have our power back after 36 hours. Small blessing to have my Parents home to shelter (and save our food) in while the utility crews did their thing. Sadly, there has been one reported death and a number of injuries. The damage to the Railroad Square art district is near castotrophic, it may be years recovering. Both FAMU and FSU suffered significant damage to buildings.. the FSU Circus had their big top tent destroyed. It will be a long time before that part of the city is functioning back to normal.
A shout out to the efforts of the City of Tallahassee Utilities and the crews helping from other utility companies. Thank You.
Will be listening to rain a little differently now.
Tuve unas vacaciones increíbles visitando España.
Translation… I had an amazing vacation visiting Spain. With what I hope will be a regular occurrence, I recently traveled with my Wife, her Sister and her Husband. A few years ago we took a trip to Indonesia with Viking Cruise lines. That trip was incredible and if you have the opportunity to travel with Viking, I highly reccommend them.
This time, instead of the other side of the globe, we only went half way around and had my first visit to Europe. I sometimes will do a lot of research leading up to a vacation and try and learn about all the things to do or not do. This time, I consciously chose to only do a minimum of reading or viewing with the intent of being surprised a little as I experienced things. I thought it worked quite well, there were genuine moments and locations that I knew nothing about ahead of time and the impact I think was greater to me.
I began a draft of this post, and it was turning into a travel blog chronicling all of my itinerary. I decided to scrap that and instead just write a bit about my overall impressions. Spain, like most countries, can feel very different depending on where you are, that was the case for me anyway. We started in Madrid, had a day trip Toledo, took a high speed train to Barcelona and then a day trip to Montserrat. Each one of those places had some similarities, but the feeling and vibe were very different to me. Madrid had a very bustling large city feel, we were only really exposed to a very touristy part of the city but I got the same feeling I get when in Atlanta or New York. Toledo, however was like stepping back in time to the Middle Ages, some of the buildings literally. It is a UNESCO World Heritage location and I really loved how well they took care to preserve this very Old World city. Barcelona, the heart of Catalonia, was almost the opposite of Madrid, while just as big and with maybe twice the tourists, things felt so much more relaxed and laid back and I could see returning to visit here again and exploring more. While Barcelona is a very coastal city, it is not far from a very significant mountain. Montserrat was a place on this trip that had the naturalist in me full and happy. It’s an amazing place that is famous for the monks that built the Benedictine Chapel and Monastery there but it also is a haven for hikers and climbers who enjoy the outdoors and the spectacular views.
Spain was everything I hoped it would be, and like most vacations, my time there was too short. I look forward to another adventure with my travel buddies.
Qui no s’arrisca, no pisca! (Nothing ventured, nothing gained!)
Another Trip Around the Sun
So yesterday’s Eclipse went by and the Apocalypse was apparently postponed. I have always loved Space and any celetial events are cause for me to geek out. Where I live gave us about a 70% coverage of the Sun but really happy for those in the totality band that got to experience the full impact of a rotating piece of rock casting a shadow on to a larger rotating rock. ;-)
Speaking of rotating rocks… the one we call home completed for me another trip around the Sun and I have now made 56 successful laps. I am (like all of us) a work in progress and as I grow older I do try and acknowledge the end goal is maybe less important then the pursuit of the goal.
A day is a vestigial mode of time measurement based on solar cycles. River Tam of Firefly