The Disappointing Protection of Prayer

An actual e-mail received today from our landlady. She is the polar opposite of our previous landlady, who, four months on, has yet to respond to a single one of our inquiries about our security deposit, and is now delinquent on responding to the small claims suit sent to her address. Reproduced in its entirety as sent to my roommate, minus full names:

Hi J,

We were keeping a close eye on T.S. Hanna and Paul and I had made the
decision that we were not going to make a special trip to arrive
before this storm. We are still in IL and had not planned to leave
for HH until the end of September due to an upcoming family reunion in
Madison, WI. I will let you know as our final plans take shape, but
estimate that we will arrive at HH about October 1st. We are keeping
a close eye on Ike and will decide this weekend whether Paul needs to
get to HH to do any window boarding before Ike's landfall.

Unfortunately, I may have left T's personal e-mail address at our HH
home and I only have his business e-mail address with me and I didn't
want to bother him at work with this information. Would you please
be so kind to let him know that we are thinking of you both and pray
that you will be safe!

Please let us know as soon as possible if anything needs our immediate
attention after Hanna's fury passes. For your convenience, here are
two IL phone contacts: (555) 555-5555—Sue's cell and (555)
555-555—Paul's cell.

We did receive September's rent and thank you very much.

Take care and drive safe on wet, flooded roads! We had Gustav's
system here yesterday and it rained all day. The rain was steady,
wind mild, but no thunderstorms.

Thank you, J.

Sincerely,

Sue and Paul

Important note: this storm was the crappiest crap fest that ever crapped on our shores. It rained. Not even all that hard. I barely noticed any wind. And lots of people got to get off work early anyway, including our newspaper's advertising department. Hanna, you disappoint me. I thought you'd at least be interesting.
My editors had me out live blogging the storm all day, an idea that would have been interesting had their been any storm to web log about (and had our web site's software been more up to date to handle such an exercise).

Most significant update of the day:

Since returning from the drenching I got at the beach, the buttons on my cell phone have decided they will no longer respond to me. I can only take incoming calls. Hanna claims its first victim! Except for, um, you know, all those people in Haiti. Yikes.

Weather You Like Adam Carroll, It Will Still Rain

Starting in about, say, late May it becomes beyond irrelevant to check the weather forecast for here, because it does not change one iota from day to day. It's a product of the oppressively hot Lowcountry summers, which mix with the air off the water and lead to sporadic, often intense, thunderstorms that will pop up at least once a day toward the latter part of the summer. My weather.com tab on Firefox gets dusty during this period, except when I occasionally check the radar map and see if a large blob of easy green or violent red is headed our way.

To illustrate:



Pretty much steady all week long. This is why I never get too bent out of shape when people worry about weekend plans being scrubbed due to rain, as it will reliably rain almost every day, and will usually clear up and return to surface-of-the-sun baking temperatures promptly. Except, of course, for Friday, when the torrential rains of heaven opened up conspiring to both make us miss out on ironically playing the Jesus-themed mini-golf course and laying the groundwork for an impressive, incapacitating hangover Saturday morning.

This was all part of the Adam Carroll (pictured below right) birthday plan, but only a small part. The real adventure comes this weekend on a seven-person adventure to the city of Hotlanta, where upon our eyes will feast on the wonder that is The Dark Knight in IMAX, then feast our bodies upon the nausea that is Six Flags. Meanwhile, his actual birthday is today, though unless I'm watching Christian Bale tower eight stories over me, I don't think it counts yet.

And maybe Heath Ledger's ghost will sing to Adam at some point. Anyway, happy birthday Adam. Let this image be your internet posterity that will forever haunt Google searches of you.