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Weather: Partly sunny. A slight chance of showers in the afternoon. Highs in the mid 70s. Northeast winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 20 percent. Thursday Night: Mostly cloudy. A 20 percent chance of showers. Lows in the upper 50s.
- Daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
- Drought conditions here. (What is the Keetch-Byram drought index?).
- Check today’s tides in Daytona Beach (a few minutes off from Flagler Beach) here.
- Tropical cyclone activity here, and even more details here.
Today at a Glance:
Bachfest continues: click here.
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center: Nightly from 6 to 9 p.m. at Palm Coast’s Central Park, with 55 lighted displays you can enjoy with a leisurely stroll around the pond in the park. Admission to Fantasy Lights is free, but donations to support Rotary’s service work are gladly accepted. Holiday music will pipe through the speaker system throughout the park, Santa’s Village, which has several elf houses for the kids to explore, will be open, with Santa’s Merry Train Ride nightly (weather permitting), and Santa will be there every Sunday night until Christmas, plus snow on weekends! On certain nights, live musical performances will be held on the stage.
Byblos: For a book so slim–maybe 120 pages–it took me a couple of weeks to make it through Sarah Orne Jewett’s County of the Pointed Firs, a sort of novel in the form of successive sketches published in 1896 after the author spent a summer somewhere on the Maine coast. The prose is elegant, the setting is often limpid, because it’s Maine, where–logging’s ravages aside–there can’t possibly be a square inch of ugliness, and a couple of characters have a memorable moment or two, but this minor classic of American literature was a bit of a slog for me. “In the life of each of us,” the author tells us she said to herself, “there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour or a day; we understand our fellows of the cell to whatever age of history they may belong.” A line like this promises a lot, but the delivery didn’t seem to be there. I finally picked up the book after learning that Jewett had been an influence on Willa Cather. Aside from Jewett’s strength of character and gliding prose, it appears Cather sped past her mentor very quickly, though Cather had also noted that a lot of us would have no way to connect with Jewett: “Imagine,” she’d written in a 1936 essay, ” young man, or woman, born in New York City, educated at a New York university, violently inoculated with Freud, hurried into journalism, knowing no more about New England country people (or country folk anywhere) than he has caught from motor trips or observed from summer hotels: what is there for him in The Country of the Pointed Firs?” I feel accused, but I’ll plead no contest.
—P.T.
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The Live Calendar is a compendium of local and regional political, civic and cultural events. You can input your own calendar events directly onto the site as you wish them to appear (pending approval of course). To include your event in the Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
January 2026
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village
Stetson University Concert Choir in Concert with Orlando Philharmonic
Al-Anon Family Groups
Temple Beth Shalom Blessing of the Pets
Nar-Anon Family Group
Palm Coast Charter Review Committee Meeting
Bunnell City Commission Meeting
For the full calendar, go here.
When I went in again the little house had suddenly grown lonely, and my room looked empty as it had the day I came. I and all my belongings had died out of it, and I knew how it would seem when Mrs. Todd came back and found her lodger gone. So we die before our own eyes; so we see some chapters of our lives come to their natural end.
–From Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896)
Pogo says
@And then
… imagine total darkness, weightlessness, selfishness, mindless gluttony, and uselessness — the inner life of donald john trump.
And its followers; people gullible enough to pay $20 (plus shipping and handling) for a $2 bill defaced by trump’s image.
Make America Grotesque Again