These posts provide a little more detail than the general /now page.

Seasons

The summer rainy season is officially over and we’re now dealing with our first cold front of the fall/winter/spring dry season. The pattern is fairly straightforward for the next several months:

  • A cold front passes through with heavy thunderstorms and rain;

  • Temperatures drop extremely low (for Florida) for a couple of days—often into the 30s and 40s °F at night and 50s to 60s during the day;

  • Conditions become postcard perfect (70s °F) until the next cold front arrives.

It’s an ideal time to get back outside and reestablish my daily walking/activity habit until summer sets back in and we go back into hibernation until mid-Fall again. However, the strong El Niño phenomenon over the Pacific is predicted to bring a wetter-than-usual winter to the Florida peninsula. An El Niño occurs when water temperatures in the Pacific are warmer than normal; a La Niña occurs when they are colder than normal. The other effect is that there have been no hurricanes originating from the Atlantic Ocean or Caribbean Sea thus far in the hurricane season, and the end of the season on November 30th may very well pass with zero for the first time since satellites have tracked the tropics. (We did have one make landfall out of the Gulf of Mexico America onto the Florida panhandle, where my folks would normally be snowbirding during January and February before advancing age made that annual trip impractical.)

Service

I’ve started hanging out at Mosaic’s Young Adult service on Thursday nights (in the lobby as I’m too old for the service itself and not yet a volunteer leader) at the invitation of one of the volunteer leaders to connect with the neurodivergent young men (and couple of adults) afterward in the Blue Shirt lounge. There’s currently a core group of four or five guys (including me) hoping to turn this into an official outreach of the church. This is in addition to what I’m already doing as a participant in the Men’s Freedom Group (sexual addiction recovery) on Monday nights.

Traveling

My fall/winter traveling plans have changed this time around. Previously, my folks would come down to the Florida panhandle during January and February, and I would drive up and spend the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Day weekend with them at their rented condo in Miramar Beach.

However, Parkinson’s, advancing age and its consequences make that no longer practical, so this past year I instead jetted up to them in rural Michigan over the same period (Breeze has direct flights between Orlando and Lansing on Wednesdays and Saturdays, so up on the weekend and back in the middle of the week).

This year, I had planned to spend Thanksgiving week making a road trip north to see my sisters in Syracuse and then repeat the mid-January flight to Michigan and back; but after checking in with everybody those plans have been consolidated. I’ll be flying up to spend Thanksgiving week in rural Michigan, and hopefully both sisters will be able to make the trip over from New York to spend Thanksgiving together for the first time in over thirty years. Breeze shifted its flight schedule that week from Wednesday to Tuesday, with the return trip on Saturday.

Music

I’m working on a Christmas cover track to publish at or just after Thanksgiving. Laying down the stems over the next couple of weeks.