It was another dark & stormy night

(let's get this out of the way...) First post! Never thought I'd be doing this! Might as well get on the bandwagon! (there, I feel so... free! C'mon! Laugh!)

Six hundred and eighty three cable channels, and nothing on but The Weather Channel. Must be another hurricane steamrolling through the southeast US. We can't help ourselves. It's Ivan this time. Inches of rain every hour, winds howling at 40+ mph (you call that wind, mate? try 100+ at landfall. yeah, well, the way things are built around here, that would leave us with a bunch of sticks... and angry fireants,) horizontal rain, flickering lights (shut down the file server 'cause it's ups can't respond fast enough to prevent an instant power-down), and national weather service alerts that cut the audio on every channel and run the warning message across the bottom of the screen at 0.3 words per minute (yeah, they even run it on TWC... pure genius). Oh, the inconveniences we endure. (uh huh. tell that to the folks in the Caribbean.)

Speaking of hurricanes, TWC, and the southeast... there's a rumor going around work saying what's really behind all these hurricanes hitting Florida is The Weather Channel trying to take over Disneyworld. I don't buy it. Altering the weather would surely have unpleasant side-effects. But in my mind's eye I can see the Disney Imagineers just down the beach from TWC's reporters at landfall, studying the storm for the new Hurricane! ride at MGM. Another theory is this is God's way of saying we better count the Florida votes right this November. They were leaning just a little to the left, I believe.

And how about those weather folks stationed all along, well, ground zero? We've decided that TWC doesn't have a retirement plan. They just send staff to the field and watch what happens. (Another joke, son. TWC has to be one of the top five employers for graduating meteorologists.)

I've always been energized by severe weather. Does that make me a rainy day person? I'm not sure how I ended up becoming a computer programmer/analyst, rather than in some career in meteorology, or even astronomy. Lord, the heavens contain so many mysteries. I was browsing the Chandra X-ray observatory today, and am absolutely amazed by the billions of oddities out there. Check it out! Our galaxy is just a speck compared to the size of many of the objects in the sky.

So much to this universe, yet look at how many of us can't reach beyond our racial, religious and provincial differences without killing each other. It is so good that we aren't God! We'd have hit the "smite planet" button eons ago. Gives you a new perspective on the mercy of God.

Well, the night wears on and there's chitlins to get tucked in. Night, night.

Psalm 103:14: "for he knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust."