My wife is in school today, with the rest of the week off due to the impending storm. School is closed, along with the local car wash, with expectations of lots of rain and a coastal surge. Fortunately, we are not in a flood zone and couldn’t afford retirement beachfront property. That’s where ownership in the Marriott Vacation Club comes in handy. If we need to be on the beach for a few weeks, we’ll let them deal with potential storm damage.

The winds and rain are expected in tomorrow, but the eye of the storm is currently offshore and headed towards the Big Bend. For us, it should be a matter of simply dealing with a tropical depression, but for others it will likely be disastrous. Some of the areas north of here were flooded by Debby, just a month ago, and could be hit again. Buying real estate along coastal Florida is like rolling the dice. Insurance costs are already through the roof.

Most of the items on our lanai and outside have already been secured. We’ll probably leave it that way for a few more weeks, since more storms are anticipated. Saturday marks the two-year anniversary of Ian that caused the most damage of any Florida storm in history. It happened just after we moved here three years ago, and we were traveling. Same was true with Idalia last year, so we won’t be gone from home in the future during this fall timeframe. 

My day started early as I dropped my wife off at 7:30 and stopped at the dog park for about 45-minutes. Between puppy outings today, I will go to Eyeglass World to pick up my new shades and to the urologist for a cystoscope to determine the best course of action for surgery. I’m certainly tired of getting out of bed every two-hours or more to use the bathroom. I’ve been dreaming for some time of restoring my fountain of youth. Tomorrow, it’s back to the General Practitioner to evaluate the results of my pelvic MRI that preliminarily shows that I will need another one focused more on the spine. All this then leads up to hernia surgery to repair a bulge near my chest incision. Storms are probably the least of my problems, concerned more with surgical depression than tropical depression.