Standing Corrected

"Don't ever forget that you just may end up being wrong."

-James Buffett

So, P and I last night found ourselves in a conversation about how Bay County has become a crowded mess, with gridlocked traffic and apartment buildings coming out of the ground on every flat surface.

"The strange thing is," I observed with an air that suggested I should be smoking a pipe and holding a brandy snifter, "the population has barely gone up over the last twenty years or so."

One problem with being a lawyer is that you can sometimes make nonsense sound like such a given that no one would challenge the premise you're asserting with zero foundation.

Then again, in my defense, I really had heard our population was mostly static, and had actual dropped some after Hurricane Michael although it has since recovered some.

This information, probably conveyed to me by a wise old lawyer smoking a pipe and holding a brandy snifter, would be categorized by Snopes as "Mostly False".

As it turns out, Bay County feels more hot and crowded than when I arrived here for a reason: according to Wikipedia it's exploded over that period, mushrooming from 127,000 folks when I got here in 1991, to roughly 191,000 today. The curve flattened out in the 2010-2020 window, mostly because of population losses in 2018-19 after Michael I reckon, but it's going gangbusters again.

Of course, the whole country's gotten a lot more crowded since then, growing in population by about a third. But Bay County's growth, if my math is correct, is more than twice that rate. And there's no end in sight.

Meanwhile, Steuben County has gone from 99,000 folks in 1990 to 93,000 today. Not healthy, but a lot more livable. I'll take it, particularly in the summer when not only is Bay County sizzling hot, but we also have maybe another 100,000 people here on vacation, more than half the population of the entire county, mostly drunk and engaging in various mayhem far from their trailer park in Sylacauga.

In other news, we thought Dean had been mauled last night, based on a report from Chris up in Corning and photos of poor Deano with a bloody nose. As it turns out, he just has a really bad sinus infection. I didn't know cats got those. And so it goes.