I've got a couple somewhere (one's in sandstone, one's in slate) with the rest of my fossil/rock collection. Back in elementary school, my mom was friends with the lady who owned Jean's Rock Shop in Houston and got her to do a display/sale every year at school. It was right up there on the awesomeness scale with the Scholastic Book Fair. I still have my rock tumbler...I need to fire that dude up again one of these days.
I can always count on @KingCheetah to post something from the same sense of humor as mine. He’s a fan favorite at the MadMax house
Mother ****er. Tropical disturbance with Beryl-like path starts brewing in Atlantic While Hurricane Debby makes its way through the Florida Panhandle, a second system is forming in the Atlantic east of the Windward Islands. By Dan Carson, Deputy Managing EditorAug 5, 2024 A new tropical disturbance could form into a depression or greater later this week. The system is taking a similar path to Hurricane Beryl, which ripped through the southern Caribbean Sea and across the Yucatan Peninsula in early July. National Hurricane Center While Hurricane Debby plows over the Floridian Panhandle en route to Georgia and coastal South Carolina, another small disturbance is beginning to take shape in the Atlantic main development region. National Hurricane Center (NHC) forecasters are keeping track of an amalgam of showers and thunderstorms riding a tropical wave near the Windward Islands on Monday. While currently disorganized, the system is tracking on a path toward the Caribbean and toward Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula and—possibly—into the southern Gulf of Mexico. Meteorologists are giving this disturbance a 10-percent chance of developing into a tropical depression or storm in the next 48 hours and a 30-percent chance of developing over the next week. "Any development of this system should be slow to occur during the next couple of days while the system moves westward over the eastern Caribbean Sea," NHC forecasters wrote Monday. "Environmental conditions are expected to become more conducive for development later this week as the system moves across the western Caribbean Sea or the southern Gulf of Mexico.” A new tropical disturbance could form into a depression or greater later this week. The system is taking a similar path to Hurricane Beryl, which ripped through the southern Caribbean Sea and across the Yucatan Peninsula in early July. National Hurricane Center If that path sounds familiar, you may recall a little storm by the name of Hurricane Beryl, which rocked its way along a similar westward route through the Caribbean. Starting as a system of storms labeled "Invest 95L," Beryl quickly strengthened into a Category 4 and then Category 5 hurricane in late June—the earliest storm of such strength to ever form in the Atlantic. Beryl then churned across the southern Caribbean Sea, flattening the small Grenadines island of Carriacou and buzzing close to Jamaica. The storm drew significant strength from near-record-warm waters in the Caribbean before thundering over the Yucatan Peninsula into the Gulf of Mexico, where it reorganized and curled northeast onto the shores of Southeast Texas. Now, none of this is to say a similar thing will happen with this new system, which appears to be less organized and far smaller than the disturbance that gave birth to Beryl—a storm that was by almost all metrics a historically monstrous outlier. It is, however, not a great feeling to see any Atlantic system hewing to a similar path as the hurricane whose debris still remains on your curb. We'll continue to monitor this system as it progresses.
The High Pressure that kept Texas really Hot in Summer 2023 hasn't appeared nearly as often this Summer. So the Texas Gulf Coast getting hit a second time in 2024 won't be a surprise to me.
Yea…I was just comparing monthly temps between this year and last year for DFW and it is so much less hot this year because of that low pressure that hovered over TX for about a week and Hurricane Beryl. Those really saved us from a dreadfully hot summer that probably would have been a record-breaker. That and the high pressure heat dome has been hanging out away from us for the most part.
