I believe by now, Tropical Storm Fay has affected every square inch of Florida. Take a look at the tropical storm strength wind swaths of this sucker:
To achieve this wind swath, Fay obligingly twisted and turned, being sure to pause and dump copious amounts rain here and there, as if our wet summer had called for more rain. If it holds according to the forecast, it will have come ashore no less than six times. It also had the dubious honor of being one of the few storms that actually grew in strength while it was over land. The swamps and Lake Ocachobee in South Florida obligingly provided it with enough energy to develop that bulge there near Miami, and then it went offshore and sat next to Melbourne--where much of my family lives--for days.
I know it appears that Tampa/St. Petersburg escaped, but they must have got at least some tropical depression strength weather. (The progression goes like this: tropical wave/disturbance, tropical depression, tropical storm, hurricane.) And the panhandle gets to play with Fay tonight.
Therefore, on the Behavioral Scale (entirely of my own invention), I'd have to rate it Highly Atypical.
To sit through, however, I'd rate Fay as Fairly Typical. For us, it wasn't very exciting. We didn't even lose power. It did get downright tedious. I found it necessary to bake a pan of brownies to relieve the bad moods of everyone in the household. There's nothing like chocolate to perk up bad moods! The most exciting part of the day was when I went down to the end of the road to rescue my neighbor, who was obliged to park her car and trudge through the water, since it was too deep to drive through. Later, we took a jaunt around the neighborhood to see if anything interesting had happened. A few trees leaned over; a few fell, but no damage that we could see.
(We did have an exciting tropical storm in 2004, when Tropical Storm Frances dumped a tree on our house. That's when everyone in the neighborhood came by to stare at and take pictures of our house. That kind of interest and excitement I don't want on a regular basis.)
Overall, I'd rate Tropical Storm Fay as Worth Talking About. I'd recommend it with reservations, but only if the choice was between that and something truly horrible, like an earthquake. Because when it comes facing nature's fury, a tropical storm is about as exciting as I'd want to get.
6 comments:
Nice review, but I'll have to pass on enduring this one in person. I much prefer my sun and humidity in Virginia to any sort of rain.
Bonus points for sharp wit.
Well the sun and humidity here in Virginia are nice but I hate crunching grass beneath my feet as I walk across the yard, yuk!
Hey Tia, ship some of that rain up here! Just some mind you, I'm not greedy, an inch or 3 will do.
Oh and some brownies too please.
The brownies, I'm ashamed to say, are gone. We pigged out.
The strange thing about this storm is that we lost our phone service--which almost never goes out--and we lost it AFTER the storm passed us by. I was thinking about blogging on living without the Internet, but the outage was much to brief to be anything more than a minor inconvenience.
Good luck on the rain! I'll do my best.
I've been through three tropical storms - two when I lived in Boynton Beach from 2001-2003, the other when Katrina reached the Nashville area as a weak tropical storm. Kinda surreal having a tropical storm warning in Tennessee, but by then, it was rather boring. Just another windy, rain-filled couple of days. But I lucked out by moving in 2003, considering those 2004 storms that passed through Jupiter.
Aah, 2004. The year a so-called mild tropical storm cost us about 4000 bucks.
Hey Tia, you are a techno buff. When you want to see something amazing pop over to my personal blog. I've got something cool (atleast to me) posted over there.
http://oldbatsbelfry.blogspot.com/
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