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Anniversary

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Mark and I celebrated our first anniversary in Tennessee. Our first day was spent in Gatlinburg, where we once again enjoyed visiting The Village. We picked up a Welsh tee for Mark and some Dragon tea (which replaces the Dragon tea that was inadvertently tossed out when we returned home last time). We grabbed a quick lunch at The Hofbrauhaus Restaurant and Cheese Cupboard, and snagged some Cotswold cheese to bring home. There are about four cheeses in the world that I like and Cotswold is at the top of the list. Unfortunately, we can’t buy it in our neck of the woods, so it’s always great to find it on one of our adventures. We spent the rest of the day shopping for whiskey and car decals. And whiskey again. Oh, and then we had pastries. Awesome!

The rest of our vacation included dinner at Smokey Mountain Brewery, dinner at The Roaming Gnome Pub, great days and eats at Dollywood, and some quality time with my family at The Island.

Our actual anniversary dinner, on July 4th, was at Margaritaville Pigeon Forge. With the intense heat wave that hit TN, it really felt like we were in Florida. The food was great (especially the grouper) and the company was the best.

Being married for one year makes me look forward to all the anniversaries to come and all the adventures along the way!

23,302 thoughts on “Anniversary”

  3. Tbilisi, Georgia — Jailed journalist Mzia Amaghlobeli gets weaker every day as her hunger strike has reached three weeks in Rustavi, a town near the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, her lawyer says. Now the 49-year-old is having difficulty walking the short distance from her cell to the room where they usually meet, and human rights officials, colleagues and family fear for her life.
    kra22.at
    Amaghlobeli was arrested Jan. 12 during an anti-government protest in the coastal city of Batumi, one of over 40 people in custody on criminal charges from a series of demonstrations that have hit the South Caucasus nation of 3.7 million in recent months.
    kra29.cc
    The political turmoil follows a parliamentary election that was won by the ruling Georgian Dream party, although its opponents allege the vote was rigged.

    Protests highlight battle over Georgia’s future. Here’s why it matters.
    Its outcome pushed Georgia further into Russia’s orbit of influence. Georgia aspired to join the European Union, but the party suspended accession talks with the bloc after the election.

    As it sought to cement its grip on power, Georgian Dream has cracked down on freedom of assembly and expression in what the opposition says is similar to President Vladimir Putin’s actions in neighboring Russia, its former imperial ruler.
    kra21 cc
    https://kra-20at.cc

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  4. Tbilisi, Georgia — Jailed journalist Mzia Amaghlobeli gets weaker every day as her hunger strike has reached three weeks in Rustavi, a town near the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, her lawyer says. Now the 49-year-old is having difficulty walking the short distance from her cell to the room where they usually meet, and human rights officials, colleagues and family fear for her life.
    kra23 at
    Amaghlobeli was arrested Jan. 12 during an anti-government protest in the coastal city of Batumi, one of over 40 people in custody on criminal charges from a series of demonstrations that have hit the South Caucasus nation of 3.7 million in recent months.
    kra24.at
    The political turmoil follows a parliamentary election that was won by the ruling Georgian Dream party, although its opponents allege the vote was rigged.

    Protests highlight battle over Georgia’s future. Here’s why it matters.
    Its outcome pushed Georgia further into Russia’s orbit of influence. Georgia aspired to join the European Union, but the party suspended accession talks with the bloc after the election.

    As it sought to cement its grip on power, Georgian Dream has cracked down on freedom of assembly and expression in what the opposition says is similar to President Vladimir Putin’s actions in neighboring Russia, its former imperial ruler.
    kra27 cc
    https://kra-23.at

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  24. Your writing is a true testament to your expertise and dedication to your craft. I’m continually impressed by the depth of your knowledge and the clarity of your explanations. Keep up the phenomenal work!

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  44. There’s a ‘ghost hurricane’ in the forecast. It could help predict a real one
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    A scary-looking weather forecast showing a hurricane hitting the Gulf Coast in the second half of June swirled around social media this week—but don’t panic.

    It’s the season’s first “ghost hurricane.”

    Similar hype plays out every hurricane season, especially at the beginning: A cherry-picked, worst-case-scenario model run goes viral, but more often than not, will never come to fruition.

    Unofficially dubbed “ghost storms” or “ghost hurricanes,” these tropical systems regularly appear in weather models — computer simulations that help meteorologists forecast future conditions — but never seem to manifest in real life.

    The model responsible this week was the Global Forecast System, also known as the GFS or American model, run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It’s one of many used by forecasters around the world.

    All models have known biases or “quirks” where they tend to overpredict or underpredict certain things. The GFS is known to overpredict tropical storms and hurricanes in longer-term forecasts that look more than a week into the future, which leads to these false alarms. The GFS isn’t alone in this — all models struggle to accurately predict tropical activity that far in advance — but it is notorious for doing so.

    For example, the GFS could spit out a prediction for a US hurricane landfall about 10 days from now, only to have that chance completely disappear as the forecast date draws closer. This can occur at any time of the year, but is most frequent during hurricane season — June through November.

    It’s exactly what’s been happening over the past week as forecasters keep an eye out for the first storm of the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season.
    Why so many ghosts?
    No weather forecast model is designed in the exact same way as another, and that’s why each can generate different results with similar data.

    The reason the GFS has more false alarms when looking more than a week out than similar models – like Europe’s ECMWF, Canada’s CMC or the United Kingdom’s UKM – is because that’s exactly what it’s programmed to do, according to Alicia Bentley, the global verification project lead of NOAA’s Environmental Modeling Center.

    The GFS was built with a “weak parameterized cumulus convection scheme,” according to Bentley. In plain language, that means when the GFS thinks there could be thunderstorms developing in an area where tropical systems are possible – over the oceans – it’s more likely to jump to the conclusion that something tropical will develop than to ignore it.

    Other models aren’t built to be quite as sensitive to this phenomenon, and so they don’t show a tropical system until they’re more confident the right conditions are in place, which usually happens when the forecast gets closer in time.

    The western Caribbean Sea is one of the GFS’ favorite places to predict a ghost storm. That’s because of the Central American gyre: a large, disorganized area of showers and thunderstorms that rotates over the region and its surrounding water.

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