The Jester Returns

And on the third day there was light, power, and other utilities. My forced blogging absence was brought courtesy of Hurricane Francis. Somehow the lack of power had an influence on blogging. That would explain the lack of Amish bloggers. I do wonder if Amish blogs would have a uniform black and white template and instead of I.P. banning would incorporate I.P. Shunning? Zip files would also be a problem for them with that zipper icon, though they don’t seem to have a problem with buttons. Hurricane Francis descended on Florida like the flood of lawyers after the 2000 election; they were everywhere annoying people and we could hardly wait till they left. The chance of a barbeque this Labor Day weekend was the same chance of making ice sculptures in Hell. If the rain had continued another day I would have been looking for ark plans and heading to a home improvement store to load up on gopher wood. In Jacksonville we seemed to be on the outer parts of the storm for most of its inhabitation of Florida. My house faired well except for the T. V. antenna that fell to earth like the Skylab on Perth, Australia. My yard and most of the city got natures equivalent of wall-to-wall carpeting. Trees left their shrapnel everywhere and I spent most of yesterday just cleaning up the effects of the storm.

I am pretty thankful that there was so little loss of life caused by Francis and knew it could have been much worse if it had arrived as a Category III or IV storm To only count inconveniences is much better than what might have happened. Luckily we had planned on such an occurrence (but not the duration) and had not stocked up the refrigerator so as not to loose much food. I have had a lent’s worth of tuna fish, though I shouldn’t complain.

During the last couple days listening to the radio you would hear about crews working to restore power. First it started with them saying 100,000 houses here were without power. Then 65,000, 50,000, 25,000, 28,000 etc. The number kept lowering and we were still out of power. I figured that towards the end the radio would say power has been restored except for Jeff Miller’s house.

Sometimes when reading about monastic life you can romanticize it and think how it would be nice to have that amount of time to pray and meditate. Then when the chance occurs like a power outage you think of doing anything but praying or meditating. God has a funny habit of shining spot lights on our weaknesses. I ended up doing a lot of reading and some praying. The Rosary still works fine without electricity, though it does require will power.

Then there is also the inevitable setting of clocks and devices once power came back on. Everything now-a-days has a clock on it. I was tempted to set each clock to a different time zone. What time is it in China? – check the microwave. What time is it in Italy? – check the stereo. We have multiplied our clocks and we still don’t find the time to do what we should.