Storms, Savings & Second Chances

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Remember when it was impossible to misplace the TV remote? Because you were the TV remote? Remember when music sounded like this?
Remember when social media was truly social? Hey John, how's it going today? Well, this show is all about you. This is Fifty Plus with Doug Pike. Helpful information on your finances, good health, and what to do for fun.
Fifty Plus, brought to you by the UT Health Houston Institute on Aging. Informed decisions for a healthier, happier life. And by New Promise Neuropathy. Lose the pain and numbness. Get your life back. newpromiseneuropathy.com. And now, Fifty Plus with Doug Pike.

**Doug Pike** (0:52)
Welcome to yet another edition of Fifty Plus. This one on a Friday. And an absolutely beautiful Friday, considering what we had yesterday and what we were told to expect from what happened yesterday.
Now that we're on the backside of Bertha, figuratively at least, that doesn't sound right when you say it the way I said it, does it? On the backside of Bertha.
Yeah, honestly, that was, as tropical storms go, that was about as good a result as anyone possibly could have hoped. There was a lot of rain out in Fort Bend County, out where I live. Four to six inches of it, I heard, in a fairly short time. But otherwise, pretty much just a rainy day. When I left to work around, I don't know what day, it was late, I know that. But I had a conversation with my son. It was still raining pretty hard. And he wanted to go into town. We're out in Sugarland and he wanted to go into town to visit with a friend of his. And at that point, I hadn't really looked at the weather channel, I hadn't looked at radar to see what was coming. And I just knew that we were in the midst of a tropical storm, and that's about all I knew. And that it was a weak one, thank goodness. But the long and the short of it was, I didn't want him being anywhere in town and trying to come back out where we are late at night, which is his typical MO. He goes and hangs out with his buddies here, there, everywhere they all go out to eat and just have a good time. And I didn't want him driving home and winding up in a flooded street somewhere and can't get out. And when I got home, I went ahead and took a look at the Weather Channel's radar and I had to run it two or three times to really see and believe what I was looking at. There were still a few little green patches on the screen out kind of close to where we were. But after that, when I ran the next six hours, nothing. I thought, holy, is that it? Is that all Bertha is going to drop on us? And when I got settled again, I settled up around the house, and I better check that radar again, and darned if it wasn't just clear as a bell. Just clear as a bell everywhere. So as the cliche goes, all's well that ends well, and Bertha is nothing but a memory now. And while I was here yesterday, I spent some time watching the surf build along the coast as that storm moved our way. Early, when I thought we probably would have had at least some sort of a pulse coming off of Bertha, there was nothing. The surf was basically flat. I don't think you could have pushed a toddler off on a longboard and had that little toddler catch the wave. It was just that flat all up and down our coast because we were on what's called the dry side of the storm, and all of us here should know that. If you don't, the counterclockwise rotation, the front end of that thing is going to be offshore wind, and it's the backside that's pulling wind and waves onshore. And none of that built up as this thing kept coming across until I'd say mid to late afternoon. And that's when all the surfers I was watching on a couple of cameras I look at on Saltwater Recon, they kept moving farther and farther offshore to catch bigger and bigger waves. And for a lot of them, the way they sat in the water, the way they tried to paddle for waves, the waves they were in at that point probably were the biggest they had ever encountered in their lives. And for my crowd, the older surfers in the audience here, it was just a solid chest high to head high day. Kind of mushy, but still fun. Even mushy little waves are fun, and mushy big waves are just a little bit more fun. I wish it had cleaned up when the surf was still big and given some of those guys a chance to really ride bigger waves, because we just don't get those options very often around here. I used to surf a lot, I really did. I had several different boards for different wave days, different waxes for different water temperatures. I was all set up, and you really don't need that much equipment. You just need a board and you need wax and courage. In a leash these days, I grew up before leashes ever existed. If you got connected from your board out there two, three hundred yards offshore on a big day, you didn't have a whole lot of options.