Florida Power and Light, the electric company down here, is giving all residents a target date of September 19 for a return of service. We are all hoping they are playing the same game they do at Disney. You walk up to an attraction and they tell you it will be a 45 minuet wait to get on the ride and when it only takes 20 you feel like you’re ahead of the game and have been given a great gift.

There is a rush you feel as you ride down the street and pass a convoy of power company trucks on their way to work on something. It was a unique sight last night as a small bunch of us were huddled around a laptop last night to watch a DVD of “Hellboy”. A generator buzzed away behind a shed as we sat in pitch darkness shoulder to shoulder trying to get the best view possible of the small screen. I missed my surround sound and 27” set so much right then.

I’ve been doing lots of reading over the past few days. There were a couple of books I picked up at a library sale a few months ago that I’ve never had the time to read. If I had the extra money I’d buy a few more to keep me busy. Charles Grodin is a very funny guy with a much more varied career than I had ever heard of before. I’d suggest anything written by him. I’m also reading “The Dark Side of Camelot” which seems to have been written by someone turned down by the Weekly World News. It understandable that the Kenendy family usually dismisses any book not sanctioned by them and they do sometime even do that to legitimate authors, but this one is such a pile of dung. It’s a lot like listening to Howard Stern. I keep turning pages just to see what he’s going to say next!

One of the oddest thing through all of this is all of the Instant Meteorologists there are around here. Walking through the office you listen in on conversation after conversation by people talking about “millibars”, “cold fronts” and “stationary fronts” as if they were working here and moonlighting on the Weather Channel. Before the storm, you would look at each one of these people and wonder how they had enough brain capacity to tie their own shoes.