September 5, 2017 - News Post

The Apple/Qualcomm battle has been going on for a few months now. It’s tricky to summarize in 4 panels. Feel free to read more here.

In non-Apple news, you probably noticed something about flooding in my last (non) news post. I had typed up a very very very very long summary of my weekend, to be posted today. Sadly, my stream of consciousness writing needed a great deal of editing. Rather than bother with all of that editing, I decided to bother with a third of that editing.

Here is Part I of Jeff’s Weekend Tale:

My morning bowl of cereal was ruined on Saturday.

Ruined by spoiled milk.... and the fact that I'm focusing on this makes me happy.

"Ew," you say. "You drink cow squeezings?"

Yes, dear reader, I do. But what I normally do not do, is smile after it's spoiled.

So why am I happy? That's a long story...

As you may be aware, Hurricane Harvey devastated the Houston area recently. It caused major flooding, ruining homes, and took lives. This is clearly a horrible thing, and I won't be making light of it.

A few days after, the remnants of the hurricane were still going strong. The winds and storms made their way all the way to Nashville, where I live. On Thursday afternoon, we had a fairly strong thunderstorm, strong enough to trigger tornado sirens in the area. The sirens sound like world war II era air raid horns, and they're not as soothing as you might think.

Despite the sirens, the weather at my home was merely an intense thunderstorm, not too outside the ordinary. Three tornados were later confirmed in the area, but I thankfully didn’t have to deal with that. I simply waited them out. When the sirens stopped, the rains ebbed and flowed in intensity, but stayed steady all night.

The power blinked out for around 20 minutes at 10pm. This tends to happen a lot during storms around here. When the power came back on, I assumed the worst had passed.

It had not.

I saw that the power was back and the rains were letting up, so I began the nightly ritual I go through to preserve my beauty before bed. It had been a long busy day in a long busy week, and I was sleepy. My wife stayed up, working on the computer.

The power blinked out a second time around 11, just as I climbed under the sheets.

I was in bed, completely unfazed by the power outage. I wanted sleep. My wife had a decent amount of battery life left on her laptop, so figured, even in the power outage, she wouldn't join me for a while. Roughly 30 seconds passed in complete darkness before Shannon bolted into the room.

"Listen!" She said.

We have a tiny creek in the backyard that spends most of its time as a dried up bed of rocks. That night, we could hear water... rushing water.

The Windows were fogged up and covered in rain, so it was hard to see. We spotted a bunch of fireflies dancing around the creek. This was out of the ordinary this late in the year and this late at night. Something had stirred the insects, something major.

Our phones had been buzzing with storm warning all night, and it was right around this time that they warned us of flash floods in the area. We decided that we would go out and take a look at the creek out back. To be safe, though, we decided to head out the front door and walk around.

As we opened the front door, we realized that the sound of rushing water wasn't coming from the creek out back, it was coming from the front. Specifically, the river out front where the road used to be.

To be continued...

-Jeff