Random Connections on the Island

Some random thoughts:

• Tropical Storm Maria was a total bust. Not that I'm complaining, but after you make a bunch of plans, you feel weirdly cheated if you don't get to use them. Maria was storming towards the Antilles, picking up strength. Then two days before it was due here it just sort of stopped and fell apart. Then the remnants sort of meandered away to the northwest, dropping a bunch of rain on the way. We were still getting rain from what had been Maria four days after the storm was supposed to have come and gone.

• You'd have thought the circus came to town. The crowds at the opening of the Home Depot was huge, and it didn't slack off at all. The store opened Wednesday and there were more than 1,000 people there. he parking lot was jammed, and even the adjacent lot had been weed-whacked and took lots of overflow parking. We wandered through but didn't even think about buying anything. The lines at the checkout were insane.

And the crowds didn't seem to abate through Sunday. Every time I drove by the place it was full. You have to understand that people have been waiting for this store for more than four years.

• Had a pleasant Talk Like a Pirate Day evening at a restaurant that was new to me. Pirates Tavern is at Salt River Marina. Non-intuitively, it's a Mexican restaurant, but the food's great. We were there in the evening and with a storm brewing we sat out on the deck, maybe 20 feet from a row of tied up boats, watching lightning flicker over the hillside that rose above the far side of the marina.

The only problem I can see with Pirates Tavern is that it's located in an inconvenient spot from where we live. No easy way to get there. But it struck me as such a fantastic place to kill a Saturday afternoon – feet up on the railing, watching the boats and enjoying a cold beer – that we're going to try that some weekend soon.

• But almost certainly not this weekend. Because another system is moving towards us out in the Atlantic. This one is likely to become Tropical Storm Ophelia within 24 hours. The computer projections disagree wildly about where it's heading, but a couple have it tracking directly over us. Others have it going far south or far north, So it's really way too early to say, but never too early to start preparing.

Maybe we should make a trip to Home Depot!