The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

While doing some maintenance on this blog, I ended up re-reading some old articles and ended up at the one about Sandy Crocker, whom you might remember as the “Lovesick Canadian Dentist”.

While on vacation in Ireland in 2011, he had a short conversation with a “striking” young woman. It was quick — barely enough time to chat about the weather and ask for directions to a local landmark — but the memory of her was so strong that he set out to find her a year later. He never got her name, so all he had to go on was the town where they met (Ennistymon) and a vague description: in her mid-twenties with freckles and reddish-brown hair. Talk about some long odds.

Here’s his segment from Good Morning America from the summer of 2012:

He never found her, but as he said after his failed search:

“You know what? You have to hold out hope in life, and it is just a situation where if you didn’t come and do it and see if you could find the girl, fifty years down the road you’d regret it. This is making sure that this isn’t something you didn’t do nothing about.”

It’s a more down-home Canadian version of those lines from Maud Muller: “For of all sad words of tongue or pen / The saddest are these: “It might have been!”

Three years have passed since that time, and I wonder what happened to him. I hope he met someone nice.

Our place, yesterday. You wouldn’t think there were floods two days ago.
Click the photo to see it at full size.

With a couple nice sunny days after three straight weeks of rain and some king-size flooding, it’s the perfect time to talk about Mr. Sun.

Photo from the St. Pete Chamber of Commerce’s Twitter account. Click to see the source.

St. Petersburg, located on the other side of Accordion Bay, is also known as “The Sunshine City” and has had a graphical mascot called “Mr. Sun” for decades. My favorite version of Mr. Sun is the 1950s one, which has recently been placed over the doorway to the Chamber of Commerce, as shown in the photo above. They should market the hell out of it — I’d buy a t-shirt, aloha shirts and loads of stickers with that design if they were available.

Here’s a montage showing various versions of Mr. Sun, taken from the Old Florida Tumblr (which is worth checking out):

Click to see the source.

I’m going to spend a day a week doing my work in various work-friendly spaces in beautiful downtown St. Pete, and I’ll even bring my bike on the rack so I can get out and about, as there’s lots to see and the streets there are very bike friendly. Expect to see lots of photos here soon!

In response to yesterday’s post on the flooding in Accordion Bay and surrounding areas, Andy Todd said that flooded roads wouldn’t be an obstacle to a motorbike rigged with special tires and skis like Robbie Maddison’s in his video, Pipe Dream, where he zips through the surf in Tahiti:

Even without flooding, there are lots of places around here to take that bike for a spin.

From the Tampa Bay Times. Click to see the source.

Accordion Bay, a.k.a. Tampa Bay is often a sunny place, but it isn’t always one. For the past twenty or so days, there’s been rain. Sometimes it’s been rain with sunny breaks, other times, it’s been rain all day. But there hasn’t been a day without some rain in the past three weeks. Combine that with the natural low-lying land near a coast, a geography with a lot of lakes, and sandy soil, and you get floods. Lots of floods.

Here’s I-275 at the Westshore offramp, where the flooding is so deep that you can’t drive on it anymore.

From Meredyth Censullo’s Twitter account. Click to see the source.

Here’s Kennedy Boulevard:

From Angela Clooney’s Twitter account. Click to see the source.

All of Bayshore is now a great channel for jet-skiing:

From Eagle 8 Photo’s Twitter account. Click to see the source.

Kennedy Boulevard, again:

From @allyconey’s Twitter account. Click to see the source.

Even first responders are running into a little trouble. Greensboro, NC-based TV reporter Chad Silber’s sister in Tampa sent him this photo:

From Chad Silber’s Twitter account. Click to see the source.

Chad’s probably wishing that he had our weather. His area’s currently undergoing a drought:

From Chad Silber’s Twitter account. Click to see the source.

At least one person here is taking things with a sense of humor and entrepreneurial zeal:

Due to the recent flooding in #Tampa, I’m going to quit my day job and start @uber with boats. It will be called Canoe-ber. 😂😂

— Levi Jaeckel (@levijaeckel) August 3, 2015

Here’s what the weather radar looked like earlier this morning:

Click the radar image to see it at full size.

My own situation isn’t too bad. The back yard’s flooded, but I’ve sandbagged and tarped the lanai door, so the house remains high and dry. I’ve got the luxury of working from a home office, and can keep a watch on things as the waters rise. Be careful out there!

Need more flood porn? Check out the Weather Channel’s photo gallery, Photos of the Deluge in Western Florida.

That’s right — Kevin Smith will be doing one of his infamous monologues at the Tampa Improv on Wednesday, August 12 at 8 p.m.. The tickets are going for $30 apiece (Anitra and I will be attending), and you know they’ll go quickly. Order now at Improv Tampa’s site if you want to attend!