Saturday, July 09, 2022

Two Views Of July Ninth Past

Here are a couple of pictures I took on a July 9th in the past.


This was taken in 2015 in Lexington, Kentucky.  I had four dogs then, but strangely, the three dogs pictured here are the ones that are still with us.  We had adopted Yoko, the chihuahua in the foreground, just a month before.  She was still a little fat.  The little beagle next to her is Winston.  He just turned 15 this week.  He would have just turned eight in this picture.  I wish he could be that young again.

Here's another picture from another July 9th:


The context of this picture is that I was returning from Dallas.  I was on I-30.  I was going to my home in Fort Worth.  Because Fort Worth was the western end of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, & because storms tended to come from the west, Fort Worth would mostly be where the storms started.  & more than once I found myself driving west, trying to get home, & suddenly facing a deluge.

This is what happened here, in 2017.  I found an old email I wrote to my wife, who was out of town, about the damage from the storm.  In addition to almost being stuck in a flood - I drove through pretty deep water to exit the highway, & was incredibly lucky that I didn't stall - I also noted that one of our trees in our backyard was uprooted.  Mostly I was sad I was away while the storm came in, & it was almost certainly stressful for our dogs.  I was in Dallas because I had made a promise to help someone because I am a nice guy even though the person to whom I was nice was probably not worth the gesture.  Appropriately, that person is no longer in my life so remembering this, I am even more guilty than I was at the time.

What is true is that I do not miss those storms.  They made terrifying torrential downpours & threatened tornados.  Holy shit!  Nothing like that in Portland.  Well, except wildfires.  Wildfires are fucking horrifying.

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