Thursday June 28th 2018

The heat advisory continued in the Memphis area today. The high humidity combined with temperatures above 95 degrees produced a heat index in the hundreds. As I’m writing this blog entry a new line of severe thunderstorms is starting to move down from the north. The current path has the worst of it passing to the east of here, but I’m sure it’s going to get wet and windy.

View to the north of the Interstate 40 bridge into Memphis.

When your new to an area it is very hard to know how to react to the local media. The TV weather talkers are really trying to get the word of warning out about the heat and storms. I don’t know how serious to take their warnings. Are they enamored with new technology that allows them to forecast more accurately and over selling the severity? Is the current weather really unusual and dangerous? The heat and humidity don’t seem that unusually bad. I wouldn’t want to do much outside physical activity, but light activity with plenty of water seems doable. The weather talkers are calling for people to limit outside activity and stay in air conditioned buildings.

View to the south of the railroad bridges and the Interstate 55 bridge into Memphis.

The thunderstorms are harder to ignore. I don’t know what unusual is for the area and I don’t know what the normal local weather patterns look like. When you live in an area for a few years you know the paths storms usually take around hills or along bodies of water. Also, I don’t know the weather talkers track record. What happened the last few times they called “wolf”? In my RV home I can’t do much if a storm is coming. If it’s a really bad storm I could bring the slide rooms in. The next step would be to evacuate to a structure with more stability. The only way to know is to watch the weather radar Apps on my phone.

My uncertainty about the weather conditions means I have to err on the cautious side. Today I didn’t do a lot of outside activity. I drove into Memphis to do more touring, but mostly just drove around and looked at things out the car windows. I got a good view of Beal Street from the traffic lights at the barricades turning it into a pedestrian area. It might be interesting at night, but the daytime view didn’t motivate me to park the car. Similarly, I wasn’t motivated to look for the ducks in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel. My one stop was at the Tom Lee park on the Mississippi River. If there was some shade I would have stayed there for a while. There wasn’t any activity in the river or I would have stayed longer even without the shade.

Today’s blossom.