Southern Belle and Handsome Hombre spent the night in a parking lot in Clermont, Florida, 250 miles north of South Miami. They made good time.
SB called us while driving at 11:30 and asked us to find them a place to stay.
All of the hotels were packed.
The best we could find was a church parking lot four miles off the Florida Turnpike. My thanks to the fine people at The Church at South Lake. They have a parking lot with about 200 spaces and it is within spitting distance of several restaurants and convenience stores.
The back up plan if that parking lot was full was to have them go another three miles west where there are several more churches.
Southern Belle and Handsome Hombre are back on the road after six hours of sleep. They have Sausage McMuffins and coffee in their bellies and about 250 miles of gas in the tank.
The boss released Handsome Hombre at 7:30 this evening. There will be no work tomorrow.
Handsome Hombre and Southern Belle are northward bound even as I type. They are currently passing through Port St Lucie and hope to drive for another hour and a half before knocking off for the night.
One of Southern Belle's frustrations is that the GPS keeps switching them between the Florida Turnpike and I-95 as accidents are reported. Consequently they lose time on surface streets traveling east or west when they could be moving north.
At 13 miles an hour Irma is moving about 300 miles a day. HH and SB will make about 140 miles tonight which will put them a little bit south of Orlando. Barring the unexpected they should make Atlanta in about ten driving hours from their overnight stay. Hopefully the traffic will thin out and the gasoline supplies will be plentiful.
I am delighted that HH and SB are out of South Miami and hightailing it for high ground.
Southern Belle is my oldest daughter. She lives in South Miami and lives three miles from the Atlantic Ocean. The elevation of South Miami is measured in inches.
Today is her last day of work.
Unfortunately, her husband works at a marina and the "boss" wants them to stay until forcibly evacuated. Her husband will be tying down boats in a marina which becomes real work as the chop increases. She hopes to get out of Dodge on Thursday evening but the boss might not release the workers until legally forced to do so...which could be early Saturday morning.
This has Southern Belle fretting a little bit as she really wants to be ahead of the curve.
I suggested that her husband ask his boss if he could borrow some of the extra five gallon gas cans from work "for safe keeping". There is a good chance that his workplace will be leveled including the storage sheds, at which point the boss would lose the cans anyway. That, and having an extra 20 gallons of fuel in the back of the truck would give Southern Belle some peace-of-mind as the northbound hoard of locust suck the gas stations dry.
She tells me their current plans are to drive to Atlanta, Georgia.
There is a good possibility that their home, a converted garage, and her husband's workplace will be leveled.
Me? Mocking members of the non-cis-heterosexual-dominant-culture, non-cis-male, non-Christian, non-working, non-Caucasian silent majority?
Never!
The reason I posted the video is because it is funny on many different levels.
The Scottish poet James Beattie first postulated that humor was the unexpected juxtaposition of the incongruous. That is, the surprising, side-by-side positioning of two (or more) things that do not go together.
Being tough
First, I must applaud the people in the video. They are out there taking risks. They are DOING something to make themselves better people. See the final paragraph.
Gait and Posture
If you read the literature in "signaling of sexual orientation" you will quickly learn that a major "signal" that gay men emit involves posture and gait. Both are reminiscent of a marionette with wobbly, floppy, limp joints. Another characteristic of this signaling is an arched posture with the weight back on the heals.
The body language of somebody who is transmitting "Don't F_ck With Me" signals are almost the complete opposite. A man who is seconds away from hitting you hums with muscle tension. Furthermore, his weight is on the balls of his feet, ready to spring forward or to shift his position.
It is highly incongruous to have a group of men with floppy postures talking about physically defending themselves unless they are afflicted with muscular-skeletal diseases.
Gait and Posture Part II
A boxing stance might not enable you to beat the other guy, but it will make it much harder for him to destroy you. At some point it stops being fun and starts being work. Author of this graphic.
Gay guys use "open and inviting posture". A guy prepared to hit and be hit...not so much.
Gait and Posture Part III
Why do you think the military makes such a big deal of standing tall, shoulders back, chin up?
Perhaps
more than anything it has to do with breathing. Extended periods of
aerobic activity demand breathing. Slouching and arching are contrary
to deep breathing.
In
most cases fisticuffs are concluded in thirty seconds or less. In
those cases where the contest exceeds thirty seconds the participant who
is breathing gains a significant advantage.
Gait and Posture IV
One person who viewed this video clip commented that one of the men had an artificial leg. Suddenly the floppiness, at least for that individual, was not incongruous because there was an assignable-cause. BAM! The joke was on us.
A little less talk and a lot more action
Long soliloquy is for Shakespeare. Clearly, the time for adroit riposte is past. The guy who is still talking will be the first person who is punched. Shut up. Really.
The "Personal responsibility"- "Collective" tension
Anybody who attempts to engage in intelligent discourse and uses the terms "personal responsibility" and "collective" in the same conversation is fooling nobody but themselves. Either you are trying to sell me a bill-of-goods or your academic conditioning created a habit of filling pauses with socialist-babble that simulates the appearance of thought when it would be more honest to say "Um..." Or maybe it is virtual signaling, or credential flashing. Whatever. The two don't go together. Another level of the unexpected juxtaposition of the incongruous.
Teaching girls to play softball
I used to work with a gentleman named Vince Ruma. Enough time has elapsed that I can use his real name.
Vince played softball. Hard-core softball. He had a daughter who he wanted to become good enough at playing softball that she would get a college scholarship. ---Spoiler: he was successful---
He knew that quality of coaches was a crap shoot. He figured that the only way that he could ensure that his daughter had outstanding coaches was for Vince Ruma to invest in becoming an outstanding coach and to volunteer. Nobody ever turns down a volunteer.
He went to a college camp specifically designed to teach dads to coach girls.
The person running the seminar, a rather "butch" woman, asked the dads why women threw differently than men.
She got all the expected reasons. Different bones. Different muscles. Different nerves.
Then she had the men count of 1-2-1-2.
She directed the 1s to pick up a softball and hold it on their "weak" side. She directed the 2s to observe. Then she told the 1s to throw the softball against the side of the building they were conveniently standing beside.
Then she directed the 2s to pick up and throw a softball while the 1s observed.
Finally, she asked the men to describe how the person they observed threw. "Like a girl." was the obvious answer.
She told the dads that the entire clinic would be run with them, the dads, using their "weak" side. By the end of the clinic, she promised them, they would be almost as good with their weak side as their strong side.
It is all about the repetitions!
Let me repeat:
It is all about the repetitions!
Watching the men working out, my guess is that they shot this video in the first week of "work outs". If they really care about protecting themselves and the people they love, I hope they continue to work out. It would be fascinating to see a follow-up video six months from now. I think it would look much different.
Another one of Kubota's friends walked into our house without knocking. He was half way across the living room before the door swung shut.
That is where Zeus lit him up. Zeus did not take a hunk out of his backside but the kid was not ready for a three second burst of 115dB barking and the show involving lots of teeth. It happened at 6:00 this morning and it interrupted Mrs ERJ's beauty sleep.
One of my deeper concerns is that the lack of courtesy indicates a certain vagueness about the concept of private property. Sort of a "Whats yours is mine..." kind of thinking.
I don't know how it is in other areas, but a large number of B&Es around here involve somebody who has already been in the house. At a practical level the perp knows the layout of the house and where any good stuff is kept. At an emotional level the perp can rationalize it with "Billy would not mind." or "Billy never gave me money for gas." or in the case of ex-boyfriends/girlfriends, "Billy needs to get kicked in the teeth." Knowing somebody in the house provides a plausible excuse when the perp is found poking around the place; "Yeah, Billy sold me a gonkulator and I was picking it up."
I chewed the kid's ass. I told him that breezing into our house was completely unacceptable and that nobody wanted to see Zeus rip a chunk out of him. I told him he needed to stop at the door and knock. Somebody will come and open it.
Zeus is a smart dog. I verbally chewed-out the kid in front of him. I wanted Zeus to know that he, the dog, did exactly the right thing. I let him slurp up the milk out of my cereal bowl afterward.
I am not encouraging Zeus to bite. I do want him to let us know that we have visitors and, if they are in the house, to pin them down until things get sorted out.
It does not bother me that a couple of Kubota's friends will spread the word that it is not healthy to enter the ERJ house unannounced and uninvited.
