There is a restaurant a few miles from my house that is built in a literal pit. You can barely see the marquee sign from the road level, and, if you aren't already on the lookout for it, the building might as well be invisible. The property was built many years ago for a now-defunct family dining concept, and in the years since, one business after another has occupied the property for a brief couple of years, gone out of business, and been replaced by another business.

Driving past the building this weekend (and seeing only two cars in the parking lot), I caught myself wondering how much longer it could possibly stay open before it closes and the pattern repeats itself. Then I realized that the current business, a steakhouse, has been in place since 2020. That's six years, actually about average for the lifespan for a restaurant and even more impressive considering the Pandemic and malingering economic concerns.

Should I pretend that I didn't notice its longevity? When it does inevitably close, as all restaurants eventually must, should I still roll my eyes and quip that I was correct that their location doomed them to failure? Do I need to be right so badly that I'll ignore reality to salve my wounded ego? What would that sort of denial accomplish?

The restaurant is a success whether I want to admit it or not.

Let that be a lesson to myself: you need to recognize when you've allowed your biases to corrupt your thinking, because otherwise, in addition to the loneliness of living in your own alternate reality, you also just might stave to death.

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It's been over a year since I was in the local hospital, and they've updated their wall art:

Because it was so pleasant to be in the ER waiting room before there were giant bugs on the wall.

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I'm so happy with how our Halloween dog portraits turned out, let's keep looking at pictures! You probably won't be as impressed with this next set, but they represent some of the graphic design work I've done in the past year for a local vintage toy store that I think turned out well.

To be clear, I do not mean to take create any of the art: those all belong to their original copyright holders for those toys. I just laid everything out to create some attractive 4- and 8-foot in-store store displays. For what it's worth, this is the kind of work that is increasingly being turned over to generative AI. My days are numbered.

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Back in May, Google drove through my neighborhood to update their Street View (for the first time since March 2022). Right now this is what you get if you Google my house:

The good news is that Google is very concerned about my privacy. Per their Google-Contributed Street View Imagery Policy (google.com/streetview/policy/):

We have developed cutting-edge face and license plate blurring technology that is designed to blur identifiable faces and license plates within Google-contributed imagery in Street View.

That's nice. But sometimes it isn't enough to blur just a face.

"I see you've noticed the ears. They're actually easy to explain...."

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FYI: My power is out. Again. Estimated time of restoration is 3 hours. No one can blame a tornado today. Apparently, the power can't even stay on through some light rain anymore.

UPDATE: It's back on! And in just a shade under two hours. They're getting faster.

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FYI: My power is out. Again.

There was thunder and lightning for six continuous hours overnight Sunday and several more hours of lightning last night. I expected power outages from those, but no. Today's multi-hour outage comes in the middle of the afternoon on a comparatively calmer rainstorm, electrically speaking. That's what I get for letting my guard down.

I live in a metro Atlanta county, and the power to my neighborhood keeps going out, multiple times a year. And it feels like the outages are getting longer. This one started at about 4PM. Initial estimate was that it would be restored by 6. Update just came in that revised the target to 7:30.* That's not surprising; a few weeks ago, the original four hour estimated job ended up taking thirteen.

For the last few months, all we've heard from local government and Georgia Power is how eager they are to invite new development, especially power-hungry data centers. Why in the world should I be supportive of that when they can't even keep the lights on in well-established neighborhoods?

So what do I do now? I was planning on going to the grocery store, but there doesn't seem much point in buying ice cream sandwiches just to bring them home to melt. I guess I'll do what I always do in these increasingly common situations: I'll wait for the power to come back on. And then I'll hustle to get what I need done before it goes out again.

*At 7:45, I got word that the newly estimated time of recovery was now 10:45PM. So I have started the gasoline generator for the refrigerator and made myself a hamburger on the propane grill. I'm getting quite good at camping at home.

At 8:23PM, the power came back on. The first thing my phone tells me after the router comes back online is that another round of thundershowers is due about midnight. I think I'll leave gas in the generator; that's the best way to be sure I won't need it.

Update 05/28: Per WSB TV, "The NWS confirmed an EF-1 tornado touched down in Coweta County on Tuesday afternoon." I had no idea, but as it happens, the start of that tornado track is very close to where the Georgia Power trucks spent several hours working to restore power yesterday evening. So i guess I should go easier on them; a surprise tornado is definitely harder to defend against than a thunderstorm. (That's the second tornado to hit my neighborhood since 2020. Maybe it's time to consider moving somewhere safer, like the side of a dormant volcano.)

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On April 1, the high was 77°. On April 2 and 3, the high was 84°. On April 4 and 5, the high was 85°. (Atlanta broke a 54-year record high.) They say it'll be cooler next week, but I decided I'd seen enough of my poodles lying around panting, so they got their first clipper cut of the earlier-than-expected summer season yesterday.

I love cutting on my living topiaries. It's very relaxing for me, and the boys don't complain too much. Louis mostly likes the attention, but Henry will make himself scarce if he sees me moving towards the scissors storage, so I have to be sneaky!

I always leave the whiskers a little longer around Henry's muzzle, but as you can see, I generally trim Louis completely. I think this is the last time I'll be doing that. Sure, he's cute with short hair, but when fuzzy, he looks a more like a teddy bear, which really suits his personality better.

Meanwhile, Henry's just ready for a break in the pollen and heat.

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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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