I once wrote:

One day, when I was little, I discovered I could hammer a screwdriver into the asphalt of the street in front of our house. This took me by surprise and made me revise my concept of the street as being hard, impervious, and permanent.

Seeing the recent damage to roads in my neighborhood threw me. When a friend sent me a pic of the spot shown in yesterday's posting, part of me believed it was real and part of me needed to see it first hand to really believe it. I rode my bicycle down the closed section of the road to check it out.

So yeah I remember when I was a kid discovering that roads are impermanent but this week I was further schooled in how impermanent roads are.

I've never considered living anywhere that's subject to frequent hurricanes. (Some people feel the same way about California and earthquakes.) I've occasionally said I thought it was dopey when public money helps people rebuild homes on the coast in the southeastern USA when it's only a matter of time before another hurricane comes and it happens all over again.

And now I find myself wanting to see a key road to my neighborhood rebuilt: a road ruined by a tropical storm, a road in a canyon which will flood again some day, a road whose repair might for all I know be funded in part by federal disaster aid.

Of three roads from my neighborhood to town, only one is passable. One is better than zero. All roads out of town to the rest of the world are closed. I'm guessing that won't last too long though. Considering the size of this storm, things could've been a lot worse. I'm glad the power didn't go out here.

A tropical storm is headed my way. This area might get a fair amount of rain, although less than what some other parts of the state are expected to get.

The county is not finished repairing damage to the main road to my neighborhood from storms this spring. There's a detour onto a narrow, twisty road that isn't suited for the traffic it's now carrying.

Never a dull moment this year.

I heard someone on the radio use the phrase "ten year tenure" in a sentence. It makes me want to write a short story and work those words into the text somehow.

National Review ran an editorial yesterday arguing that Jack Smith's latest indictment is weak and should not stand. Two prominent lawyers independently wrote rebuttals that tear NR's arguments to shreds: Ken White's People Are Lying To You About The Trump Indictment and a Twitter thread by Ryan Goodman (unrolled here if you prefer).

Ken White's response is the more comprehensive of the two. It explains why the indictment is apt and is worth reading no matter whether you care about anything NR says.