| Hurricane Preparedness Week is this week: https://www.noaa.gov/hurricane-prep Time flies somehow. Hard to believe it's almost hurricane season again. Christmas doesn't seem that long ago. I looked at a model map for the first time today. A meteorologist here in Tampa was talking on the news Wednesday night about a chance of a subtropical storm forming off the eastern U.S. over the weekend or early next week. GFS: https://www.tropicaltidbits.com/analysis/models/?model=gfs®ion=atl&pkg=mslp_pcpn The Atlantic season still officially starts June 1st, but because we do occasionally get earlier storms. In the future we might see it start on May 15th, like the East Pacific season. They're still looking into that. In other news, Ida (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Ida) was retired: https://public.wmo.int/en/media/press-release/hurricane-committee-retires-ida-prepares-2022-season "Geneva, 27 April 2022 (WMO) - The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Hurricane Committee has retired Ida from the rotating lists of Atlantic tropical cyclone names because of the death and destruction caused by the category 4 hurricane in the United States of America in 2021. Imani will instead be used in the lists of names, which are overseen by WMO to help in the communication of storm warnings and to alert people about potentially life-threatening risks. The names are repeated every six years, unless a storm is so deadly that its name is retired - as in the case of Ida. In total, 94 names have now been retired from the Atlantic basin list since 1953, when storms began to be named under the current system." Eventually I'm not going to live on the water either. A great time to sell and a bad time to buy. Or even rent since everything is a lot more expensive. Not only is it very expensive to buy right now, with so little inventory an offer is accepted before most potential buyers have a chance to do anything. I guess you would need to be looking at what's available fulltime. And then you're still very unlikely to get it unless you pay over the already high asking prices. I have made one decision about my one story house. Whenever we sell it, it will be for someone to tear it down. It hasn't been updated since it was built over 40 years ago and the list of issues is very long. We have so many windows and glass sliding doors in my house. All single pane. Terrible for air conditioning. Also the windows aren't that strong. Several weeks ago I successfully killed a mosquito on the bathroom window and shattered a panel in the four panel window. (only a half inch scratch on my hand that is almost fully healed already) Eventually we'll fix it with a cheap piece of glass and either a frosted film you can apply on it or a can of spray paint you can buy to get the frosted effect for privacy. Might be a cheap $50 to $70 fix because it's behind a screen and no one would notice. I've had a piece of cardboard wrapped in plastic taped up for now. And our house is so low. When my dad built the house they were just about to make it so that you were required to build higher, and therefore be more expensive. He thought he lucked out at the time. Of course we know better now. He wasn't thinking about hurricanes at that time. Tearing down houses seems to be what people do in my neighborhood now. (with one story houses like mine) For like 10 or 15 years people usually do a remodel when they buy houses in my neighborhood, but didn't usually tear down houses. Now there have been a few being torn down in the past year. Although construction is stalled on one because of shortages I think. Then there is also a house that was damaged in a hurricane several years ago, I think due to rain, and half of it was kind of torn down. But it's been like that for a long time now. You can see inside it from the street since the wall on the two story house is gone on one side. They might be fighting with the insurance company. Although at this point, it's been exposed to the elements all year and needs to be torn down. It's a huge decision to move. I guess we'd be likely to rent for awhile. For now, and I can't say when it would change, with the pandemic and the difficulty of finding a place it would seem, it's just easier to not do anything. One day I'll sell and hopefully find a rich person who doesn't believe in climate change willing to build on the water on a canal just off Tampa Bay. Anyone else would be crazy! |