I haven’t posted a blog since the middle of July.

A lot has happened since then, and I am sure much has happened in your life during my hiatus as well.

Living in The Land With Two Seasons, as I do, the weather has become one of my most watched spectator sports. It’s not just the heat, which by New York standards is excessively hot and unbearably long beginning in May and ending in time for Thanksgiving if we’re lucky.

Ninety-degree days with an index of over 100 can be annoying, but it’s watching storms developing off the coast of Africa that really grabs your attention. No sooner does one storm veer off the coast of the United States than another one is heading our way.

So far, we have had only one hurricane that brushed our coastline, and now that we have passed the September 10th peak of the hurricane season, am I tempting fate by hoping we have made it through another summer?

The sad fact is that the hurricane season runs from June 1st through November 30th. I wonder if we ever had a hurricane on Black Friday?

I lived on Long Island for over thirty-three years, and we had three hurricanes during that time and one Super Storm named Sandy. In all four storms, we suffered a few fallen limbs and loss of electricity three times, ranging from one week for Sandy and two to three days for the others.

With power lines above ground surrounded by trees, it only took one good gust of wind to power us down for the week.

Fortunately, here in Bradenton, all our utilities are underground, which has prevented long-term power availability, and the steel shutters have provided protection from flying debris. Luckily, these have never been truly tested as we have had only one direct hit of a hurricane and have only experienced glancing blows the other times the west coast of Florida has been hit.

So now I watch weekly weather reports to comfort me that we are getting closer to November 30th. Like a prisoner awaiting his parole date, I seek release from the potential categories coming up the coast and the next names on the list that might be heading toward Bradenton; I check off the weeks on my meteorological calendar and then do the NYT crossword.