So Mondays are tough enough for pretty much all of us, but today it was better to be a fish than a fisherman on Matlacha Island as we had to weather the effects of Tropical Storm Emily for most of the morning. Yes, we had lots of lightning and torrential downpours. There were even some power outages, even though the wind and surf weren’t really all that bad. Matlacha has weathered storms that were far, far worse, including a hurricane that took out the bridge in 1927 even before it was completed and open to traffic! But Emily just goes to show that for all our modern forecasting technology, including Doppler Radar, barometers and the like, it’s hard to predict Mother Nature.

So what happened? It’s easy enough to understand in the aftermath of the storm. There was an almost unheard of cool front moving down the peninsula that ran smack dab into a warm, low pressure system and, boom, a tropical storm formed in less than three hours. Fortunately, the system was already close to land so it didn’t have time to strengthen. In the end, we just got a lot of rain, a little wind, and a reason to stay home this morning rather than brave the rain.

Believe me, we’ll take a month of Emilys over a single Charlie or Donna. No, no, no. We don’t need to hurricanes this year, or ever.

Just sayin’.