Saturday, September 7, 2013

8:19 AM News – A cat was found sitting on a mat inside an apartment house in Waterville, NY with an arrow piercing through his abdomen. A woman who lived there took him immediately to her veterinarian and they performed two surgeries on him to get the arrow out and repair his liver, stomach and spleen. The cat is said to have a friendly and bubbly personality, purring and interacting with all the workers at the veterinary hospital. The veterinarian said he eats whatever you put before him, so he isn't even picky. He is going home with one of the clinic workers when he is healed, which is expected to be in about two weeks. Police are looking for the heartless person who shot him. Some people really are without mercy. How could anybody fail to appreciate the beauty, grace and lively personality of a healthy cat? I understand that some people hate or fear cats, but that, too, seems groundless to me. Fearing dogs I understand. They really are a great deal more likely to be hostile and bite. I wish I could keep an animal easily here. I miss my cat Sally Petunia. She was full of personality and very beautiful.

I have looked up the locations of primary physicians and psychologists in the Riverside neighborhood and came up with at least one psychologist and one primary physician. The psychiatrist is on Post St. and the family doctor is on Riverside. I got the bus routes from the apartment to Ginger's on Atlantic Blvd., and it only takes two buses. The apartment is on the P4 route like my present apartment is, though I would have to walk about two blocks to get to the bus stop. Here it's right in front of my building. Will I be able to walk two blocks at the age of 70? The answer is, if I keep my legs in condition with these new ankle weights I should be able to. If I don't keep in condition, I will go downhill fast and have a lower quality of life, so I had better exercise!

According to my grid map of Jacksonville, the surface streets to Riverside are W. Bay St. to Park St. I need a new map that is not divided up into pages to see it better, though usually the print is smaller on those. The page division on this grid map makes the route hard to follow on those small streets. I hope Kangaroo has a map.

Mapquest has failed me. They no longer have slots into which you type the addresses to and from your locations, but have something called the Crawler which has to be downloaded and my computer flashed up a malware warning when I tried to do it. I am going to have to buy a street map of Jacksonville somewhere. I do hope Kangaroo has one, because I don't know where any other source of maps is near me. I wasn't going to go out today, so I'll try to remember it the next time I do.

UPS brought me two packages yesterday. It should be a book and two ankle weights. Opening them now. Well, the book The Butler is small, only 96 pages, so it shouldn't take too long to read. The ankle weights are comfortable. I was afraid they might be too heavy. I have them on now, and I may just make a habit of wearing them around the apartment to make the most of the walking that I do. I'll know after a few hours if that will make my muscles sore. I hope not. Walking. Well, I can definitely feel the extra exercise in my calves, the muscles above my knees and the gluteus maximus. I think this is what I need.

Lunch time now.

Reading about hurricanes again. Tracking and naming the storms have evolved over the history of European settlement in the New World. Christopher Columbus mentioned several large storms, but managed to stay safe from them. This book credits Benjamin Franklin with the first important new knowledge about them. In 1743 he deduced that a nor-easter which he observed in Philadelphia had moved from Boston by the fact that the clouds obscured a lunar eclipse in Philly, which he had been going to watch. He got information that the nor-easter had reached Boston after the eclipse was successfully watched there. His theory was that though the storm winds came from the northeast the body of the storm was moving from the southwest. Six years later he tracked a hurricane from North Carolina to New England, proving that the storms did move up the coast as an intact body rather than forming spontaneously where they hit. In 1831 a William Redfield published an article in a scientific journal describing the storms as being circular in form or “whirlwinds” with the wind blowing inward toward a slowly moving center. He also tracked hurricanes for the first time moving from the West Indies to the east coast of the US. He must have painstakingly tracked the changes in wind direction in the storm to have understood their shape and that they had a center of circulation, since he had no way to observe the storms from above as we do today. An Englishman named Henry Piddington went to India and observed storms there, giving them the name “cyclones,” a term meaning “coils of a snake.” The Jesuit priest Benito Vines of Cuba followed hurricanes until his death in 1893 and created an elaborate warning system throughout Cuba made up of volunteer observers, telegraph warnings and ship reports. He set up a system like the pony express of the US mail between the isolated villages to warn the inhabitants.

In 1870 Pres. U S Grant charged the U S Army Signal Service with the responsibility to track storms and give warnings in the US. They began the use of weather maps. Then in 1891 the U S Weather Bureau was formed under the Dept. of Agriculture, but only in 1898 was a specific hurricane forecasting service established. The first forecasting center was in Havana, Cuba. In 1902 it was moved to Washington, DC and in 1935 to Jacksonville, FL. In 1943 it was moved to Miami where it shared activities with the Navy and the Air Force. The first airplane flight into the eye of the storm was in 1943. In the 1950s radar began to be used to track storms and in 1960 the first weather satellite was launched into orbit. Communications also were improved, and computers came into use. Today the organization, still based in Miami, is called the TPC or Tropical Prediction Center and the National Hurricane Center is their forecasting facility. Due to the early warning system and the evacuation plans, casualties have been greatly reduced. Current techniques include supercomputer atmospheric modeling, Doppler radar, high altitude reconnaissance and global weather studies plotting seasonal trends.

The naming of storms in the 1700s through the first half of the 20th century was not done systematically. Storms were mainly identified by some popular name such as Racer's Storm or the Padre Ruiz hurricane. The Ruiz hurricane was given that name because it happened to occur during his funeral. In the nineteenth century they were named according to their position at sea as determined by ship reports. That proved confusing when there was more than one storm active. In the late 1800s an Australian meteorologist started naming them with women's names. In the US during the early 1900s they were given numbers within the year in question. After some years military observers began using alphabetical code names like Able, Baker, Charlie etc. Then in a 1941 novel the writer used a woman's name, which became the official method of naming in 1953. In the late 1970s the feminist movement became aroused and raised vociferous complaints, and in 1979 men's names and foreign names began to be used. When a storm causes a great amount of destruction that name is retired and never used for another storm. Hugo, Andrew, Opal and Fran have been retired. This system of naming is now used internationally, and prevents confusion.

The rest of the book goes all the way through to Opal in 1995. I didn't read about all of them simply because there were too many discussed, and the overall picture of what hurricanes are capable of doing has become clear to me. My appreciation for the potential damage has gone up since reading this. I had become used to seeing storm reports every year, and was beginning not to fear them much. The truth is that most of them don't hit Jacksonville, though the pages of this book showed that over the period on two hundred years a fair sized number did come in here. The theory is that the land mass of Georgia jutting out to sea right above Jacksonville tends to steer hurricanes out to sea and around us. Obviously that isn't always the case, though. The hurricane that I shouldn't fear is the one that doesn't hit here, because where they do hit directly, with the eye passing over, the damage is frequently catastrophic. Florida's ever increasing population centers along both coasts make the problem worse, due to the danger to so many human lives. I will pay more attention when a storm is moving toward us now, and maybe give thought to going to a shelter, though if there is a widespread power outage even a shelter might be pretty uncomfortable. The author stresses that there will be other “great” hurricanes like Hugo, Andrew and Fran, and any hurricane that strengthens greatly within a short distance from land is likely to inflict great damage and do so with surprise, even though our forecasting is better in recent years. Our evacuation routes and shelters aren't sufficient. The author said that secondary roads are preferred as routes over Interstates and turnpikes, which can become choked with cars trying to evacuate, and possibly becoming death traps as the cars can't go anywhere. Also some evacuation plans involve the staggering of the times that cars from adjacent localities get on the road. Each family, he says, should have an emergency evacuation route planned out before the storm is approaching, and that going a short distance of even ten miles may be more effective than trying to go a hundred miles or more. It has occurred to me that from here it is probably better to go west rather than north, because there is no river or shore there. I would probably get on Beaver St. and go as far as Baldwin and look for a motel room there. The other thing is to go sooner rather than later, especially if you are planning to stay overnight, or you may have to sleep in your car.

It's 7:35. I have read past my mealtime again. Once I get involved in some subject I can be very single-minded. To eat now.