Miami Madness

Let me clear up a few misconceptions you may have about living in Miami Beach, if you have never lived here before. At least during the summer, it is not the sunny, sandy paradise you see on the postcards and in movies. It's very wet because A) the intense humidity that flattens or frizzifies your hair (depending on what kind you have) as soon as you step outside and B) the daily thunderstorms that always drop a few inches of rain and sometimes hail. Usually they do minor damage and blow over in about an hour. But yesterday I was convinced that we were in the middle of the first hurricane of the season.

Our new office on Lincoln Road is equipped with windows along every wall and is safe from flooding on 6th & 7th floors. It's like I had box seats to witness the madness below. The thunder slightly shook the foundation and lightning streaked across the sky, sometimes striking the building that was under construction next to us. The power flickered a few times and the elevators were in and out of service. I thought the rain was just hitting the windows more heavily than normal, but raindrops don't bounce. It was definitely hail - ranging from marble to golfball-sized. I wasn't scared of the storm so much, having lived on Florida coasts for the better part of the last six years, but more scared for figuring out how I was going to swim home with my laptop. I took a few pictures with my iPhone from various views in the office.

During:



The Aftermath:



The stores and restaurants across the street were definitely flooded and it was a little different to being seeing not boats, but cars, with trailing wakes. I found this great video on YouTube that will gives you a street-level perspective on the whole thing - if you didn't see it on the news already.



I was still working on a pitch project til about 9 pm when Aron and Chris drove to pick me up because we were going to see Nicole's hubby's Improv show in Coconut Grove. Aron had to walk, or wade home from class earlier and said there were cars with water up past the windows and they even saw two guys in a kayak going up and down Alton Road.

Anyways, we got back to the beach between midnight and 1 AM and it was pretty much like driving through an obstacle course between the deceptively deep street-ponds and the abandoned cars throughout the street that had apparently stalled out earlier.

I was so excited when I woke up this morning and actually saw the sun. I put on the pink bikini and headed downstairs to the pool, only to see the clouds roll in out of nowhere about an hour later. I wanted to get some of my tan back and start reading Twilight. I consider it pretty much a hazing ritual to get into my team at work because they have all read it and I am being all but forced to do so as well. I tried to keep the cover hidden because I don't want my rep getting tarnished. So far it's an easy read but I'm definitely not swooning and I don't think it's better than Harry Potter. It's so unrealistic, not because the guy is a vampire, but because he has this complicated emotional persona with pure intentions. Ha!



I definitely have no intentions of watching the movie and we'll see how far I can get into it before I barf or get bored.

On a final note, I finally got version 3.0 of my website revised, up and running at mirandapeterson.com. I designed then coded the whole thing in Flash and Dreamweaver. I'm still working on getting my final book together, so don't bother clicking on that link. I wanted it to have a simple, sketched look to it and be easy enough to quickly navigate and update. I mostly think of it as an aggregate for all my creative outlets. Oh, and hopefully it will help me get a job.