Month: November 2023

And a lot of it.

There’s a severe weather alert in effect for us. 70 MPH wind gusts are possible. Based on what I’ve been hearing they’re already happening. Technically the worst of it shouldn’t be here until later tonight. The advisories don’t expire until Tuesday.

Great!

Winds this strong can pick up all kinds of crap and throw it.

I’ve already been out this morning, moving things around to secure them. I’ve stacked chairs so that their combined weight should prevent them from blowing off the deck. I’ve tucked the picnic table chairs under the stairs  to keep them in place. Other outdoor / deck things I’ve moved into the basement. 

I’ve got an event to attend this evening so yippee! The freeway will no doubt be a lot of fun. Hopefully I can make it to the venue and back without incident or debris on the road.

I’m thinking the pup will have to be inside, in his crate while I’m gone. He’d probably be okay roaming the house but I’d prefer to come home to things as I left them rather than shredded fabrics or whatever. He’s not done that kind of thing in a very long time, but if he’s bored and I’m gone for hours, he might go down the “Bad Dog” road.

My original plan was to leave him outside. He likes this time of year and often spends the evening surveying the world from his deck until 9:30 PM or so. With the strong winds such as these, a balmy 49°F quickly becomes uncomfortable as heck. 

According to the navigation information I’m going to be spending an hour and a half on the road, there and back. I know approximately where the venue is, I don’t recall it taking that long to get there. But it is in LA County and well,,, I guess that alone explains a bunch of ills.

I haven’t been in LA County for years. Literally! I think the last time I crossed the LA Country line was in 2020. I crossed then, only because I was taking a drive toward Mountain High in the summer. I wanted to get to the peak where it’s possible on a clear day, to see all of the LA Basin and sometimes the ocean.

Actually crossing into the LA Basin is another matter. I think the last time I did that, was in 2018. Going into the LA Basin tonight should be interesting.

It’s strange to me that once LA was someplace that I enjoyed. I worked in the area and there was a lot to do and see. Over time, LA lost its sheen and I became reticent to go into the city, especially if I didn’t have to. In part I chalked it up to not wanting to make the drive, when I didn’t have to make it for work.

The other half used to say, “It’s not that bad…” he’d cajole me then we’d go do something together. I noticed however that in more recent years, even prior to COVID, we’d only do things in the daytime and would be out of LA by early evening.

I thought it was his work schedule, or the distance, or that we were getting older and “Growing Up”. I wonder now if it was all of those things and that we’d seen changes in the city that concerned us on a subconscious level.

During the COVID lockdowns and the “Summer of Love” we watched in horror the events unfolding in LA and in an odd way silently agreed neither of us needed to go to Los Angeles for anything.

So we didn’t, even after the lockdowns ended and things started to return to normal.

We weren’t afraid per se, we just didn’t see any need to expose ourselves to the insanity that LA had become.

It’s amazing how much has changed since I moved to California in 1978. 

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Followup 11/20/2023:

Prayers answered about the wind. It died down about 30 minutes before I left home. Jesse got to stay outside where he could run around and not be cooped up “His Room,” meaning his crate.

The expected winds along the South facing foothills also didn’t materialize until well after 9PM. While I was at the venue I checked the conditions and noted that the High Wind Advisory and High Wind Warnings were not being shown on the weather app. Driving home there were a few gusty conditions but nothing like the 70-75MPH winds the warnings all mentioned. I got home about 11pm to find the pup curled comfortably on his outdoor bed sound asleep.

The garage door opening didn’t even rouse him. It was the lights throughout the house, as I was getting out of my suit that caught his attention. He gave me the obligatory sad puppy face (for guilt’s sake) and then spread himself crossways on the bed making sure that I understood for my transgression (of leaving him,) I would have to wrestle my way into the bed, or bribe him.

The dinner was very good. The music was lovely, I’ve always been a sucker for Viola da Gamba. Chatting with the folks at the table was fun and interesting. The talk about Samuel Johnson was also interesting. It had never occurred to me that there would be competition among lexicographers either contemporaries or those separated by time.

I’ve never opened a Johnson Dictionary, I don’t usually like Merriam Webster Dictionaries, (Although due to their ubiquity I seem to find myself using them often.) I’m more of a Funk & Wagnalls kind of guy, I have spent many happy hours wandering through the Oxford English Dictionary , and various other unabridged dictionaries.

I can say that the speaker last night gave me a new appreciation of the dictionary. Now if only more people used a dictionary and the words and meanings contained therein more frequently.

The point of a word is to convey meaning, if a word is disconnected from its commonly accepted definition then meaning is lost. If only one word in a sentence suffers this kind of misuse, the context of the sentence can still allow the reader to glean the meaning intended by the misused word. That ability rapidly degrades if several of the words in the sentence are also ambivalently defined.

There is no better example of this, than Kamala Harris’s famous “word salads”.

I walked away from this event having learned some new things, and heard a number of new words being used conversationally. (NO, Not new dirty words… Dang it!) Even If those new words were being spoken by an attorney.

It’s time for me to be off and continue with my chores around here.

Have a good day.