Good morning. We'd love to tell you you're waking up to a world better than the one in which you drifted off into fitful, troubled slumber, but there's honestly just no money in it. Scared and spending, people, that's our role.
The westbound lanes of the new overpass on the St. Pete side of Gandy opened to traffic yesterday, allowing area purveyors of goods and services to begin the difficult transition from complaining that construction is hurting their business to discovering the new pattern has murdered it.
A Pinellas County nurse was arrested for administering a dose of morphine rejected by the patient it was meant for to another patient for whom it was never prescribed. Morphine: Not the same thing as half of a buddy's sandwich.
Kids these days: A 14-year-old Pasco girl was arrested for shoving her mom through a glass window, then stealing the mom's phone so she couldn't call the cops. Things probably could've been salvaged, though, right up until the point at which the girl called her mother by her first name.
And finally, we got ourselves a Tropical Storm Bret out there in the southern Caribbean, with another system showing the potential to become a tropical depression or storm, too. But if you didn't start stockpiling fresh water and batteries back around, oh, say last November, you're obviously the doomed lackadaisical grasshopper in this scenario, and not the prepper-survivalist squirrel.
This article appears in Jun 15-22, 2017.