Weathers

    Right now I'm in Yulee, Florida. This is where my parents and my sister have lived since the Summer of 2020. I flew here yesterday from BWI and landed at Jacksonville airport, which is about twenty minutes from my parents' house. The weather is mild today, and it was mild yesterday. About seventy degrees and sunny. It's bright outside in Florida. In Maryland there's usually more cloud coverage even when it's sunny outside. Some days it's grey. Other days it gets pretty cold even after a succession of warm and sunny days. I wonder if it will snow again in Maryland, although that might be strange given that it's almost April. Maryland weather is mostly erratic and the seasons don't change cleanly. One day it will seem like one season has given way to another, and the next day the weather will try to revert to the weather of the previous season. Equinox and solstice are only words there, and the dates that the words are meant to refer to often don't reflect their meaning.

    I'm not sure if the weather is as erratic in Florida because I'm not here as often. When I've been here in the Summer I can say it has been consistently very hot, and then there will be a few days of rain and storms. The storms are more intense in Florida. The thunder is louder and the lightning strikes are veinier in the sky. I don't think it will rain this week, although it will be alright if it does. I like where I live and I like where my parents and sister live, even though they are different places.

    I woke up around 10:30 this morning and took a shower. I went to lunch with my grandparents at a small barbecue establishment with pretty good food and a nice simple environment. They sell all of the standard barbecue staples, which is nice because it makes for a variety of things to eat and try if you end up going there a few times. I've been there a few times. My grandparents had two fifty-dollar gift cards when I was down here last Winter. The gift cards were gifted to my grandparents for Christmas. I'm sure they've spent those gift cards by now, but we can go to the barbecue place anyway because the food is pretty good and it's affordable anyway. My father met the three of us there for lunch, and I think the total was forty dollars or so. This seems like a very reasonable amount of money to charge for four people to eat lunch: ten dollars per person. Or just about. I think more places should adopt this simple method for charging people to eat a meal-sized portion of food. I ate some ribs with coleslaw. This sort of lunch-experience is what I often call a grandparent-lunch, or in this case a rib-lunch. Usually I don't have ribs for lunch. I also had ribs for lunch yesterday. I'm feeling very ribby.

    I walked my grandmother into a small library branch near the barbecue establishment after we ate. It reminds me of a library branch I used to go to in Owings, except it's a bit smaller and has fewer computers. My grandmother and I walked in and greeted the two librarians sitting at the reception/research desk. They greeted us in return. My grandmother was looking for a book by James Patterson co-written by Dolly Parton. I don't know anything about this book except that it apparently exists, but it's interesting that such a book exists. I have no doubt that it exists. Behind the research desk, two men were seated at the computers and they were both watching the screens. The man on the left was watching WWF wrestling, and somebody was being thrown through a table; the man on the right was watching what looked like a pop music video, but I didn't get to watch the screen for very long because he turned to look at me and I instinctively averted my eyes from his direction. I don't know why I did this. I don't think it would've been offensive to keep looking. I could have just waved amicably anyway. But for whatever reason I averted my eyes dartlike. Meanwhile my grandmother was talking about some of the books on the small shelves next to us, mostly lined with commercial authors who I've heard of but never read.

    The man on the right computer who had sharply turned to look at me while I was looking at whatever he had been looking at on the computer monitor then motioned to the man on the left and he said something while he did this. He gestured meaninglessly in our direction, and the man on the left looked at me too. I saw this in my peripherals, and I looked over to see both men looking at me. They looked like they didn't like me looking at them, and I didn't wave because I moved my eyes away from them again as soon as I had looked. I thought that if given the opportunity I could've explained that I was only looking at the computer monitors that they were also looking at and that I was just momentarily interested in what they were watching because there wasn't much else going on in the little library branch. Even if there were something else going on, things like WWF wrestling and pop music videos are flashy and entertaining, so my eyes were naturally drawn to the images. I wasn't allowed to explain these and other momentary concerns, so I moved my attention to my grandmother and listened to some of the things that she said about the different authors and the books they wrote. She ended up picking out an adventure novel about a married couple who solves mysteries written by an author who had written or co-written many other stories about the same mystery-solving married couple. She wasn't able to find the book co-written by Dolly Parton.

    We walked back out to my grandfather's truck and got in. I held the passenger door for her as she entered the vehicle. She made a joke to my grandfather about not actually reading any of the books that she checked out from the little library. I sat in the back passenger side, and when we got back to their house, a house located just across the street from my parents' house, I gave my grandmother and grandfather a hug and helped them carry in two styrofoam boxes of leftovers from the barbecue place. My grandmother invited me to have french toast with her tomorrow for breakfast or lunch, depending on what time I wake up. She likes to save the thick-cut buttered bread from the barbecue place and use it to make french toast instead of eating it with the rest of her barbecue-food meal. I told my grandparents that I would see them later and that I loved them, and I walked back to my parents' house to spend some time in my own company and maybe try to do something like what I'm doing now.