It was only a matter of time before I experienced my first bit of Weather. I took this picture a few days go from my own personal satellite, Philos 4, which I can redirect to any corner of the globe at the flick of a switch - I usually use it as a means of reconnoitring beaches for possible visits.

It shows tropical storm Fay heading north from Cuba towards Florida, where it came ashore a record four times, dumping massive amounts of rain and killing ten people. It's now heading west across the Florida panhandle, and is likely to pass very close to New Orleans unless it suddenly peters out or veers off track.

What's a tropical storm? Well, I only had a vague idea until Fay started making headlines, but now I know that it's like a little sister to a hurricane, a cyclonic storm with less than hurricane-force winds, but the potential to develop into one.

People here are very blasé, as well they might be, having lived through the most destructive hurricane ever to hit the US. But they're not complacent, because they know that tropical storms are dangerous, destructive creatures.

In other news, we bought a car yesterday. I'm fast approaching my fiftieth birthday, but have never owned one before. You can manage perfectly well without a car in England, where the public transportation, for all its faults, is excellent.

Here, there's a bus that goes past the end of our road every fifty minutes until about 6 pm, with nothing at the bus stop to tell you when the next one's due. There's a very picturesque streetcar service that has just fully reopened after Katrina, and lots of taxis, and that's about it.

You can manage without a car, and the centre of town is very pedestrian- and cycle-friendly. But there's a feeling of being trapped in a gilded cage, with a great big state out there just begging to be explored: the bayous, Cajun country, the Mississippi plantations. There's friends and family to visit, and affordable places to shop rather than our local ludicrously overpriced supermarket, so I'm looking forward to having my horizons expanded.