storm

The storm is in full force. We haven't been hit in our part of the bay as badly as in San Francisco, but it is still pretty rough outside. I had the curtains open at breakfast and S. look amazed and signed "water". Yep, lots of water. Our power went out for an unknown length of time last night/this morning and came back on around 7 based on the time registering on the digital clock in S.'s room. I woke up when it surged back on and it took me a while to figure out what was weird--our air purifier didn't come back on and the room was so quiet except for the howling wind and rain outside. I liked listening to the rain, but I needed the white noise to get back to sleep so I had to turn the machine back on.

Anyhow, needless to say, S. and I are staying in today. Hopefully we will maintain full power.

raining iguanas

In a somewhat rare weather event, it froze in eastern Florida (where my sister lives) a couple of days ago. Sadly, this also froze many of the iguanas that live in the trees around there. It is, apparently, raining iguanas now as they drop dead and frozen out of trees.

Yeah, ew. And very David Lynch-esque is you ask me.

On a related note, my sister is a naturalist at a county park in Florida. One of the park's visitors (a boy in his early teens) brought my sister a frozen and dying iguana yesterday and asked if she could save it. Well, no. One, the freeze was a natural event and in the course of nature things like iguanas die due to such events. Such is life. My sister explained this to the boy who kept asking if she could bring it in and warm it up (my sister is very much opposed to interfering with natural circle of life type things). Second, and I am not sure if she explained this to the poor kid, but the iguanas are not native to the area and are invasive. The freeze killing them was actually a positive thing in terms of the natural habitat. Anyhow, in the end my sister told the boy they could find a nice place under a tree to lay the iguana down to finish dying and they did that. Wild animals die and when they do because of a natural event human interference is not appropriate.

I have more to say about human interference with wildlife but I will save most of that for another post. But I will say that my blood boils every time I see some idiot at our local park feeding the damned ducks, geese and coots. Contributing to a huge overpopulation problem while making the birds ill with human food is so very, very wrong. It just pisses me off. More on all that later.

cat-willies

The storm has given Harlie a major case of the cat-willies. Poor thing.