No matter what the calendar says, spring is here. You can tell by all the thunderstorm warnings and tornado watches.

According to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) tornado database, the city of Newnan, Georgia, has been hit by five tornadoes since 1974. An average of once a decade doesn't seem so bad, but three of those have hit since 2020. One of those brushed the entrance to my neighborhood. Another leveled the local high school.

Also according to NOAA, "Severe Storms" have accounted for over 50% of all the disasters to strike Georgia since 1980. (That category doesn't include "Tropical Cyclones" or "Flooding," which combine for an additional 23%.) Here in the Bible Belt, we like to thank Jesus when a tornado takes out our house but leaves us alive. Given how frequently the weather strikes these days, I guess that means Jesus loves us more than he used to.

I am not a climatologist, but given that tornadoes are driven by heat thermal energy in the atmosphere, it's probably no coincidence that the ten warmest years in recorded history are also the past ten years. This bodes poorly for the near future, especially in the current political environment where combatting climate change is taking a back seat to, well, everything else. (Which is why the current administration has proposed cutting the NOAA staff in half. Tornadoes might be more common than ever, but at least they're getting harder to track!)

I have started paying attention when the forecast calls for severe weather. Not that I can do a lot about it, other than make sure that I'm in the basement. Since I live in a basement, that's not too hard. But, as a famous slaveholder once said, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

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Henry and Louis' first snow day.

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I threw a ball into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
Or, more perhaps it flew such height,
That trees would dare constrain its flight.

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On Thursday, September 19, as reported by Fox 5 Atlanta, "a man was taken to the hospital after officials say he was shot by deputies during a confrontation in Coweta County overnight." That confrontation (in which the shooting victim charged police with a weapon but survived the encounter) began as a domestic violence disturbance in the home of the man's parents right here in my neighborhood.

On Friday, September 20, as reported by 11 Alive News Atlanta, "a Newnan man is facing a murder charge in the shooting death of a woman at a local gun shop late Friday night." That man, the owner of the gun shop, lives in his former grandfather's home in my neighborhood.

To be clear, they are not the same man.

Multiple news sources have posted their mugshots. Both of them are middle-aged, overweight, bald, white men. The only thing keeping a witness from picking me instead of them from a police lineup is that I don't have a beard, a distinction that I'll be sure to maintain.

They've always told me I was most likely to die within 10 miles of my home, I just didn't think it would be at the hands of one of my neighbors. Just to be safe, ya'll might want to stay away from my 'hood for a while.

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There's a new yard sign that has been popping up lately around my neighborhood that has a picture of a particular ex-president alongside the words "Let's Go Felon." I don't understand it.

If it's a pro-Trump sign (and it is not an official campaign sign, I checked), why does it advertise that he's a felon? Being a felon is not something that most people would choose to celebrate. Is it supposed to be ironic, by which I mean is it a political statement that the State of New York is an unjust government (with a corrupted jury pool) that has no right to find someone guilty of the crime of falsifying business records? If that's the case, I'd expect it to have sarcastic quotes, you "genius" Trump supporters, you.

On the other hand, if it's an anti-Trump sign, why would any Never Trumper want a picture of that guy in their front yard? I certainly don't. (I see quite enough of him on the evening news, thank you.) Would they post a sign advertising any other felon?

I should mention that I first saw this sign in the yard of a home that also has a family of bigfoot signs, which is making it harder for me to interpret the intention here. Do they love imaginary creatures? Lost causes? Fairy tales? Conspiracy theories? I just can't tell. I can't even knock on the door and ask; they have a gated driveway. If there are actually any bigfeet, they're not actually welcome.

Maybe this is just another thing that will have to remain in the very large bucket of things I cannot understand.

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For years, I've been trying to think of what epitaph I want on my tombstone. My mother is under instructions that if I die weirdly — electrocuted by eels, run over by an ice cream truck, hit by a meteor — I'll want that carved in stone. And if I die normally, she should lie and say that I spontaneously combusted.

On a related note, a recent incident at one of my town's finer dining establishments gives me another idea. "Shot to death in a Hooters parking lot over a plate of wings" would make a pretty darn good tombstone.

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The bitterly cold 13° temperatures we experienced last week did not leave us unscathed.

Believe it or not, this flooded cellar was the result of an exterior spigot freezing and cracking. We thought we had the spigot well covered with an insulated sleeve, but it was just too damn cold for too damn long.

The spigot froze and snapped entirely off. Instead of flooding the yard, the water rushing out of the pipe shot straight into the still-secured sleeve where it hit a dead end and rebounded into the cellar ventilation. The resulting underground swimming pool did a whole lot of damage to the water heater and furnace.

Thanks to a lot of help from restoration professionals, plumbers, HVAC technicians, and electricians, we're getting close to the other side of it now that the temperature is back to an unseasonable 70°, warm for January even by Georgia standards.

The entire experience has taught me two lessons. One, we should tie the insulation sleeve on much more loosely (a frozen yard is better than a flooded basement). And two, winter sucks.

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In late December, the power in my neighborhood was out for days. In late March and April, it was out for a few hours. As I type this by candlelight, we're on hour 5 of the latest outage.

I don't understand why this keeps happening. If it's trees falling on power lines, why are we allowing any trees to remain near the lines? If it's old transformers, can't we predict failure and start replacing them?

Or maybe the problem is more insidious.

You know who loves it when the neighborhood is dark? Deer!

I'm on to you, you bastards.

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From this week's Newnan Times-Herald:

Quote:

The Coweta County Sheriff's Office has been hosting the conference since 1993, offering free training for law enforcement and first responders in areas such as long range precision rifle (above photo) K-9 handling, DUI detection, use of force, State Opioid Adapted Response and the legalities of various aspects of policing.

Personally, I had my fill of "long range precision rifle K-9 handling" the one time I watched Old Yeller.

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The big winter storm came through last night, bringing with it sub-freezing temperature and crazy wind. As is usual for these sorts of things, half of my neighborhood lost power immediately; our backyard neighbors lost theirs at 2 AM. (The yard was awfully dark.) Fortunately for us, we only lost cable and Internet.

Power company estimates a restoration by 8 PM tonight. There's no estimate yet from the cable company, but I'm not complaining about that. Better to be bored than cold.

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