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So.

Aunt Ida finally left on Sunday. After 4 days of blowing, driving, horizontal rain, flooding and overall nastiness, she packed her bags and headed out of town.

I had been hoping to post each day so that ya’ll could feel with me the pain, the relentlessness that is one of these damn nor’easters, but that hope was squished on Wednesday when we lost Cox, which is phone, internet, and TV and then further smooshed on Thursday when we lost power, leaving us sitting in the dark listening to the howling wind and pounding rain til Saturday, taking cold showers and cooking on our little propane camp stove.

It’s fun camping in your house.

For a day tops.

Then it gets old.

Really fast.

But anyway, so Aunt Ida finally booked, leaving a little friend behind.

La Princessa is a 570 foot (that’s almost 2 football fields to you and me) container barge that was being towed from Puerto Rico to New Jersey when she and her tug parted company up off the Eastern Shore. Aunt Ida’s winds pushed her back southwards and up on our beach where she almost took out some condo’s and our fishing pier.

But she didn’t and now she sits hulking, wondering where Aunt Ida is.

Looks like the storm formally known as Hurricane Ida is coming for a visit. And like the annoying in-law whose visits you dread, it looks like she’s gonna stay awhile.

And that’s a problem.

Typically hurricanes are fast moving events. They ramp up and blow out in 24 hours or so.

This storm is supposed to be with us for almost FOUR DAYS. By tomorrow winds are forecast to be 35-45 knots with gusts to 55 and seas are supposed to be 13-16 feet. And stay that way, for DAYS.

Tonight when I walked Cutter and Tug it was raining horizontal and the wind was 25-35 with gusts to 40. You can lean into 40 knots and almost have it hold you up. Everything was swinging and swaying wildly, dancing in the wind and wet sand was already blowing and drifting across the beach road. The wind makes a weirdly eerie moaning sound blowing through the power lines that’s all but drowned out by the roar of the ocean.

It’s wildly beautiful, in its own way, but honestly? four days of this shit is going to rub raw and while I know living at the beach isn’t ALL bikini’s and beers, it’s like, c’mon, enough, already.

I don’t usually do book reviews or comment on books I read mostly because, really, who am I?

But The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is an exception ’cause it’s, quite frankly, exceptional. And the fact that it won a Pulitzer doesn’t hurt my creds either.

It’s Junot Diaz’s first novel and I’m always drawn to first novels. I kinda remember reading reviews about it after it was released but then it was lost in the shifting muck of my memory. While out shopping last Christmas I ran across it at a bookstore and picked it up.

I’d like to say I hurried home and read it right away but I didn’t. Instead, it sat on a bookshelf for the better part of a year while I bought and read other books mostly best forgotten.

I finally got around to reading it last week and almost immediately wondered why I had waited so long, why I had kept pushing it to the bottom of the pile.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a high speed rollicking ride down the haunting tragicomedy highway of three generations of Oscar’s Santo Domingo (Dominguan?) family. Spanning the late thirties to the present it’s the story of his family’s inescapable familial fate.

While the story itself is kinda predictable the storytelling is anything but. Written with a raw energy and peppered with latino slang, Junot uses lengthy footnotes that are as entertaining as the story itself. The book is truly a literary event. (whoa, check me out, this is why I don’t review things- I start sounding like a turd)

Honestly though, it’s one of those books that you don’t want to ever end and even when it predictably winds down to it’s predictable ending it’s so well written that you’ll find yourself reading and re-reading the last couple of pages over and over and savoring the feelings they bring out.

It’s that damn good.

Tomorrow is one of most favorite days of the year.

Why?

Because our blessed almighty Federal Government says tomorrow is 25 hours long instead of 24. I loves me some Federal Government.

Now, according to all the newspapers and the radio and the TV everybody’s supposed to set our clocks back one hour before we go to bed tonight and get an extra hour’s sleep. Puhleez. That’s about as much fun as gettin’ oral after you’ve passed out.

Not that that’s every happened to me.

Instead, why not wait until tomorrow and take your extra hour whenever you want and use it to do the things you love doing for an hour longer?

Here, let me show you:

Suppose you’re her and you’ve just baked up some of your unbelievably sinfully chocolatey treats but you’re worried it’s getting too close to The Husband’s dinner time for a taste test. Not a prob. Just turn back the clock and start shovelin’ ’em in, sister.

Or perhaps you’re this chick and you’re slapping silly a bear hunter in a bar in Aruba for using the f-bomb and it’s getting late but your hand isn’t tired yet. Just get B to turn back the hands of time and keep slappin’ away, baby.

Or maybe you’re him and you’re just chillin’ on the beach soaking up some fall sunshine and swilling coldies and staring at the horizon like it’s gonna change and you don’t really want to limp back home yet and walk your dogs who just wrenched your back out AGAIN. Simple. Reset your watch and grab an extra hour, gimpy boy, and drink and drool on yourself.

Or, hey, use it to get more sleep.

Whatever.

I apologize for yesterday’s post. In a fit of weirdness I wrote three hundred words about a clock that doesn’t work.

But what’s weird is that that’s not the weird part.

What’s weird is what spawned it. Like most everything it was symptomatic of something else completely unrelated.

Last weekend a couple of our nephews and his girlfriend and friend stayed with us and helped me paint Casa Oceandoggy. We got a bunch done and turned the corner so at least from the street it looks all nice and new and freshy. Bling baby.

But that wasn’t the weirdness that made me write about  a broken clock. The weirdness started with the delivery of something I’m going to roll out soon with them there and then with other friends stopping by and Miss Carol showing off the something which became something else entirely and before I knew it I had close friends and family reading my blog.

I was outed.

And it totally weirded me out.

It’s one thing writing anonymously, broadcasting to strangers and quite another watching your nephew’s girlfriend reading your shit on her laptop. Kinda like the difference  between throwing up in the alone darkness of the beach and vomiting on your buddy’s shirt while he’s wearing it.

Hence the clock story- a reaction enfeebled.

It took me a couple days to come to grips with this whole bold new frontier. To realize from here on out it’s only gonna get worse in that I’m gonna have more and more people I actually know knowing about oceandoggy.com.

It’s weird.

Ever have one of those days where you’re fishing in really shallow waters, knowing your chances are slim to none of catching anything worthwhile? And yet, you keep it up hoping on hope that something will come of it?

This is one of those days. Slackness masquerading as substance.

We have a clock mounted on the bulkhead between our kitchen and dining room that we call crazy time and I actually took a picture of it for this post before realizing how unbelievably lame it was.

The picture- not the crazy time clock, but maybe this post.

The clock was given to us by one of Miss Carol’s brothers when he came to visit. It’s hip and cool and very contemporary, with loads of textures and gobs of happy colors. It’s onliest problem is that it doesn’t keep time in the linear, accepted, sense, choosing instead to keep time in a more abstract and contemporary fashion.

I’ve fixed it a couple of times but it’s stubborn, which is fine, meaning I finally just succumbed and gave up. You gotta pick your fights and there’s lots you’re not gonna win and this was one.

Instead, Miss Carol and me have accepted and embraced our crazy time. The clock’s hands freely spin at their own speed, whenever they want, at a rate known only to them, and we’re just constantly entertained by whatever time it gives us.

Hoo boy, can laziness pirouette?

Me and the boys are alone tonight and tomorrow and tomorrow night.

Miss Carol’s out of town on business for a couple of days so Cutter and Tug sit and stare relentlessly at the horizon waiting for her jeep to come around the corner and bring her home.

Hour after hour, just waiting and hoping.

Their fierce devotion to Miss Carol always makes me glad somehow, while at the same time maybe just a tad envious.

Cutely spastic and gangly beyond all reason but a killer nonetheless.

Fresh crab blood is coursing through his veins and a keener look has come to his eye, a newly bolder swagger to his stride.

In the past Cutter has always sprinted up the beach pausing only to plunge his nose into each and every sand crab hole snuffling deeply his disappointment at not catching one.

We laughed and thought it funny until last week. It’s all funny until somebody gets hurt.

Miss Carol had to go into the hospital on Saturday to do some programming so we were walking the beach earlier than usual and as usual Tug was loping along waiting for his next biscuit and Cutter was crab hole sniffing.

Same old, same old, until we saw him corner a crab away from the security of it’s hole, darting in and out snapping at it. The crab had it’s claws out, scurrying back and forth, and I was just waiting for it to lock onto Cutters face, thinking that would be the end of this nonsense  when all of the sudden Cutter juked and jived and came up with the crab in his mouth and flung it, trotting away.

Miss Carol was worried that maybe the crab had been hurt so I trotted up just in time to see it’s little legs feebly kicking their last. Sorry bud.

Miss Carol was not happy.

Then, on the way back up the beach to home, Cutter cornered another bigger crab and without wasting any time at all snapped it in half and spit it out before we or it could do anything and moved on seemingly uncaringly.

That’s my boy.

A cold blooded remorseless killer with crab breath.

I finally drove Mighty Whitey home the other day.

What  an oddly, absurdly, lengthy, stupid story.

Back in history, back in the day, a company, a guy, gave me a quote to totally restore my Suburban. He promised me the world- everything would be new and freshy and I trembled in anticipation and threw money at him.

What began as a three week project, tops, slowly ground into months and months of endless visits to his garage hoping to keep the project moving forward and seeing that it wasn’t moving forward at all and then finding out that he does this.

All the time.

Come to find out, there are some cars on his lot that have been there, unfinished, for YEARS.

YEARS.

So I’m thinkin’ I’m gonna have to ride shotgun with a shotgun and have Mighty Whitey towed out of there but something about my personality and good looks convinced dickhead to at least get the body work and  paint done and he did and so I picked her up and drove her home on Friday.

She’s not the perfect restoration that I was wanting and hoping for but she’s to the point that I can finish.

And she’s home.

Another touron tragedy and yet another solid reason to stay away from the beach and the ocean.

Once again a touron did something stupid, something that he may have been forgiven for in another place or time but not in this time or place. Nature can be a bear, or in this instance, a shark.

Mr. Snead was a 60 yr old man prolly just out having a good time on vacation- checkin’ out the babes, maybe sippin’ some coldies. But he forgot the biggie and inserted himself as the weakest link in the food chain by swimming at night in the ocean.

C’mon dude. Did you not watch JAWS?

Sharks feed at night and in the dark hours before dawn. I feel for him. I can’t imagine a more horrible death than quietly paddling about and feeling the brush of something big and circling and wanting.

But, c’mon dude.