The weather around here is a bit crazy, we're learning. One minute it's sweltering in the 90s, the next minute everything is soaked in a torrential downpour. One day it's beautiful beach weather, and the next day there's a typhoon warning. That's what happened two weekends ago.
Saturday Adam was on a surfing mission so we found a nice beach near our house with waves. It was a nice way to celebrate the end of summer, and it was hard to believe looking at the weather all the storm reports we'd been hearing. But sure enough, Sunday night the wind started gusting and we got to shut all of our storm windows (the big metal ones that look like they're made out of boxcar trains). Luckily, it didn't turn out to be bad at all. The storm slowed down pretty fast once it hit land. We could hear and feel some heavy wind, but nothing armageddon-like. The heaviest of the storm was supposed to hit overnight and I never got woken up once.
Mostly it ended up being a good vocabulary lesson. Storms start as a "tropical depression" (so named for being a low-pressure system), and then get upgraded to tropical storms at about 40mph. That's when they get named. Ours was named Jelawat. (hehe, apparently it's a fish) Finally, if it gets strong enough the storm becomes a typhoon (~74mph). Typhoon is just a different word for hurricane, but you probably knew that. I've always been thrown off by Captain Haddock, and forget that real people say typhoon in a non-cursing way. A super typhoon is an extra strong storm (think Category 5 hurricane).
So you can imagine our nerves when we heard that Jelawat was listed as super typhoon, yipes. The naval bases sent out preparation information, but we couldn't figure out why no one seemed too concerned. Clearly we were the new kids on the block. Some of our neighbors never even closed their storm windows. It's hard to imagine typhoons being so commonplace in life as to be uneventful (although it had been downgraded to tropical storm by the time it reached us), but we'll probably get there too. For now, I'm just glad we had a gentle introduction to typhoon season. Since they mostly come May- November, hopefully our next lesson will wait for next year.
Adam rented a paddle board for the day.
Those things are hard! It felt like kayaking standing up, how do people think of these sports?
Madeleine watching Daddy, swimsuit already two-toned from the sand.
Our water baby.
Absolutely fearless. She would sit down in the water,
sometimes up to her chin, and then giggle crazily as she ran back out of the waves.
One of the families from Adam's command came out and joined us with their two boys,
so they all had a great time digging up the beach.
Sand everywhere!
It's hard to tell, but that guy standing up is Adam. Way to go!
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