s e v e n i s a j o u r n e y

No luck with the alpaca farm visit, by the way. They never answered their phone ! Poop !

Although we’ve had a bit of rain, a good bit of evening heat lightning, and some threatening looking overcast, in general folks are *not* bracing for a hurricane here. I spent Wednesday with an old school chum, Ken, touring a local game park and watching Colleen Doran dish the dirt on the independant comics scene.

The game park was a lot of fun, tempered with the usual overtones of depression at seeing a lot of wild animals shut up in a zoo, tempered again with the knowledge that most of them were injured/rescued/rehabilitation cases & wouldn’t have survived in the wild anyway. It was weird to see foxes and skunks and porcupines and racoons and bears and groundhogs and bobcats and pumas — and heck, squirrels, chipmunks, and crows — and think, “Look ! Wacky North American fauna !” The squirrels would cheerfully mug you for peanuts, as would most of the resident herd of whitetail deer. It being the end of summer, the place was lousy with fawns, too — SO CUTE !

Okay, some of y’all may remember hearing about/reading an article on the genetics of domestication, that described a breeding study done on foxes, and noted a gene that linked the flight response with melanin production ? With the result that “tame” foxes ended up with spotted coats, and the observation that “domesticated” breeds of, say, pigs, cows, dogs, cats, horses, etc., all come in piebald versions, while their wild counterparts do not ? Anyway, this game park, which has been in operation for 40 years, has piebald *deer*. At least one that we saw. Seriously wacky.

Yesterday was spent being spoiled by my mom, who took me to an outlet mall and bought me a ton of clothes. Yay jeans ! Yay bras ! Yay Mom ! We also found a shop stuffed to the ceiling with alpaca stuff — sweaters and rugs and pillows and you name it. At prices to make me vigorously agree with the observation that we need to be adding some serious value to our produce if we plan to compete with an existing third-world mass-market. That, and do more to lift the prices those South American producers are getting.

Nothing like waking up in the morning, stepping out to hear the birds singing under a clear blue sky. Then suddenly I notice the target somebody painted on the lawn. And then an ominous voice intones “Frances is coming”!!!

Yes, the latest track has us right in the middle of the coming storm. Currently a category 4, with sustained 145 mph (>220kph) winds. Plus an expected 4-6 meter storm surge. Plus oodles of rain. And it is currently over the warm costal waters so it might even strengthen. I have spent much of the morning trying to get my grandmothers place ready. Storing away the potential-projectiles of outdoor furniture, filling water buckets, moving breakables away from windows. The good news is that these places were built after hurricane Andrew in 1992, and are rated for 120 mph winds. We shall see. After the 11 AM update (in 30 minutes) we will have lunch, and I will start driving north. At which point I find out what the evacuation traffic is like. Life in a disaster movie! Woo! My flight from Orlando is tomorrow at 2PM, by which time we may be getting into tropical-storm force winds, depending on the advancement speed of the storm. If the airport shuts down, I will have the choice of hunkering down, or more likely jumping back in the rental car and seeing if I can make it to Atlanta, and to a flight out of the region.

Starting to feel like a 50-year-storm magnet here!