08 Oct Monday

[Last Updated: 2018-10-08 21:38 EDT]

The sky is very overcast this morning and you can see that the sea is more aggressive. The sea here normally has tiny waves with very little power, but we can see that today they are coming in with more force. This seems to be overspill from Tropical Storm (probably Hurricane by the end of the day) Michael. It's heading north towards the Florida Pan Handle by Wednesday. What it means for us is increased wind, it's quite breezy here, plus more cloud and higher chances of rain (70% on Tuesday & Wednesday - today is 20%). It's also very hot and humid this morning.

So we are sitting watching the forecasts on TV when the phone rings. This is a normal occurrence and we usually let it drop to voice mail. There are a lot of automated calls here. However, this time on the TV screen it pops up a little banner in the corner saying this is an incoming call from some number similar to 818-EMERGENCY. So as you would, this is something to take notice of! The banner pop-up is likely some sort of emergency broadcast system that Spectrum (their cable/internet/phone provider) operates in this area.

Anyway, I was expecting information on the Tropical Storm advisory which was announced this morning, however it was an automated notification about tonight's water shut-off. There have been boards up along the street which have been talking about a planned water shut-off for a few days now. It's to do with some maintenance work and essentially we'll be without water for 8 or so hours overnight tonight. We then are advised to boil water for drinking/cooking for the next 24-48 hours until it's declared safe.

We don't do much cooking in the apartment and coffee is normally boiled anyway, so it shouldn't cause us an issue.

We stayed in the apartment for most of the day. Having lunch on the balcony, we watched a very heavy rain shower come over the apartment. Fortunately, the wind was blowing from the back of the apartment, so the rain was blowing away from where we were sitting. It stayed hot throughout though.

It brightened up quite quickly after that, so we decided to head down to the pool for 30 minutes. We got chatting to another woman in the pool and commented how quiet it has been this week so far. We estimate there's only 6 apartments in use a the moment, out of about 16. She thought the reason was because of the reported red tide issue in the area. We've not seen anything ourselves, but the problem can kill marine life of all types which will then wash up on beaches. This may well have steered some to cancel as it's not very nice to use the sea during such an issue.

After the swim, and with the sky still overcast, we drove over the bridge to a nearby ice-cream place.

We've often driven past this place and seen it packed with people and loads of cars parked outside. We go in, on the back of a rain storm, and there's no one in the place. Just a young girl behind the counter. Something we said!??

It was very tasty though. We stopped off at the supermarket to replenish some stuff on the way home, then ate in the apartment and sat and watched some Netflix. The sunset tonight failed to make an appearance. It was completely, clouded over!