Tomorrow for Monday’s Music Moves Me, we’re building playlists about sweet things, like candy. Funny how that would be the subject for the last day of Just Jot It January 2021.

When I was in grammar school, there was a small grocery store across the street from school. It didn’t sell many groceries, but it sold a lot of candy, gum, Hostess pastries, soda, and other junk food that kids like, especially after a hard day at the hands of the Sisters. I think the only way the store stayed open was sales of junk food to schoolkids. Now, of course, you’d have parents outside protesting the place…

It was a different world then. The candy bar you bought and ate was of no consequence, because the calories in it would be burned off in the walk home. The wax tubes filled with colored sugar water you bought and consumed before crossing Loyola Avenue for the afternoon session (and God help you if you were to bring any kind of consumable onto the school grounds) were essential to staying awake from 12:45 to 3:15, when you usually had reading, religion, and spelling (all the harder classes were in the morning, when they knew you’d be more alert). And the bottle of Pepsi or 7-up you had after school gave you the energy you needed to get home, put on your play clothes, and go out and play until dinnertime.

At least, that’s how we justified it…

This is the last Just Jot It January entry for 2021. I want to thank Linda Hill, who put the whole thing together and gave us a place to dump our pingbacks.

Always liked that song…

Over the years I’ve talked about my relationship with beaches and water. You know, for example, that to a Chicagoan, the beach is that sandy area next to Lake Michigan, and that my grandparents’ back yard was the beach and park at the end of Albion Avenue. You know that I’m a terrible swimmer and that, being of Irish descent and having a redhead’s coloring, I burn pretty easily and severely. And you know about the day when I walked from Santa Monica to Venice and back along the beach next to the Pacific Ocean. I think I might have even mentioned that we used to spend some time each year at Lake Delavan in southern Wisconsin, where there was a small beach and swimming area, and that years after we stopped swimming in the lake, they had to drain it and deal with an algae problem, which Kip said was because we weren’t there urinating in the water.

I’m not a beach type of person, to be honest….

Linda Hill runs Just Jot It January, and may I say it’s a highlight of my blogging year. It’ll be over this Sunday, and I’ll miss it.

Tuesday night, more like Wednesday morning, my phone started making all kinds of noise, I woke up to the sound of sirens going off… yep, it was a tornado warning.

It’s not unusual to get severe weather just about any time of the year where we are. We’re near the Gulf of Mexico, which sends a lot of warm, moist air toward Atlanta. If there’s a wedge of cold, dry air coming from up north, that can be a recipe for some stormy and potentially dangerous weather coming in. Fortunately, we haven’t had to deal with too much severe weather. In fact, it all seems to go around us.

I’m all prepared where I am: I have multiple weather apps (including a couple of radar apps) on my phone, as well as radio and TV apps to follow whatever comes our way. And, if the storm knocks out the electricity (and thus the wi-fi here), there’s always the 5G from a nearby cell tower, and if I can’t hook up with that, I have a couple of AM/FM/Weather band radios. In short, the chance that we won’t be able to get up-to-the-minute weather information is practically zero. Not that it changes the weather….

Linda Hill runs Just Jot It January, and we’re all happy she does…