Perhaps you are a lot like me. When danger passes we forget about it while we should be on guard for that danger can come again – and again.  This is particularly true about living in South Florida.  Of course, the recent experiences the Gulf Coast had with Hurricane Katrina and the East Coast with Hurricane Ophelia should tell us that one hurricane per season is the exception.  In fact, the latest visitor to our shores is due tonight in the form of Hurricane Rita and us, here in South Florida and particularly the Keys will form the welcoming committee.

That last is a joke.  We have not really come to grips with the facts that this warm paradise at the southern most tip of the United States, spawns hurricanes that sweep through Jerry Built homes and neighborhoods all too frequently to allow us the comfort of self-congratulation that we have chosen the best place in which to live.  There is talk about infrastructure, regional planning and unregulated growth fostered by the greed of developers.  Yet the demand for more housing in manifestly dangerous places goes on and the response of rapacious developers and compliant politicians is to meet the demand by placing more and more people in harms way.

We humans are really delicate creatures.  We thrive in temperatures that are not too hot and not too cold.  We do best in temperate climates but with our inventiveness providing us with heat in the frigid places and cold in the torrid places we manage to get by.  If there just was not that snake in the Garden of Eden – that paragraph in the contract you signed buying into this area, things wouldn’t be bad at all.  But there are also the wind and the rain, not to miss out on the thunder and lightning which seems much closer here than where we lived in New Jersey.

At this moment the sun is shining and it is quite lovely here in North Miami Beach.  We are not anywhere near Miami or anywhere near a beach unless you consider the tiling around our two swimming pools (one is supposed to be heated but the mechanism is chronically disabled) a beach.

One of the ironies of living here in Paradise is that we are subject, being delicate creatures, to some dangerous effects of too much sun. We are great consumers of sunscreen and other commodities to cover us when we go out to lie under the rays that have given us the moniker of the Sunshine State.  Too much of anything is not good for you.

We are waiting (not impatiently) for this new storm, Rita.  You never know what you are going to get.  It is sort of like a box of chocolates.