The cleaning was, thankfully, relatively uneventful. Great tech and she gave me some kind of "ozone" treatment that's supposed to reduce tooth sensitivity.

To test that hypothesis, I stopped at Publix and bought a pint of Ben & Jerry's. Hey, you can't argue with research.

But Publix was very busy. The checkout bagger said it was nothing compared to yesterday.

I don't know. I think we're going to be fine. There's a front that passed over yesterday that looks like it's keeping the worst of Milton to the south of us. We will have some storm surge issues, and for folks in St Augustine, that's going to be a problem. But I don't see the Intra-Coastal flooding. I could be wrong, but I'm not worrying about it.

Milton was a big topic at the reception desk at the dentist's. I think it's because we haven't had a hurricane affect us around here very recently, and Helene was such a catastrophe, so folks' sense of anxiety is elevated.

There was no gas at the Shell station by Publix. Apparently they've been shifting the stock west to keep those stations full as the evacuations take place. They'll backfill us after. Again, I'm not worried, but we were down to half a tank and I figured I'd top it off. We don't have to do any driving, so the batteries should be adequate for the time being.

The bagger also said they were out of propane too. Everyone bought that up expecting to have to cook all the food in the fridge when the power goes out.

I don't think the power will go out. Again, most of the worst of it is going to be to the south of us and, this part of Florida has much of its utility infrastructure buried. Now, that may be a problem with severe flooding, but it pretty much limits the damage from a wind event. I think folks are just going to have a lot of extra propane for a while.

But the real insanity is constantly electing Republicans who are more interested in waging culture wars than dealing with the catastrophe unfolding before them. Part of me wants to say that we deserve everything that's going to happen to us. But I also happen to think that nobody deserves to experience this type of thing.

We didn't have to. But we didn't do anything about it either.

I guess it's like Clint says to Gene Hackman at the end of Unforgiven.

"Deserve's got nothin' to do with it."

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 11:29 Tuesday, 8 October 2024