The last several days seem like a surrealistic haze. A hurricane will do that to you. I spent Wednesday wondering if a storm would come this way. I spent Thursday walking around thinking about how much my surroundings would change in the next day or two. Thursday afternoon my employer let us off early to get ready for the storm. I went home and asked my wife if she thought I should skip the concert (that I was supposed to take Beth to that evening) in order to devote my energies to storm prep. Thursday night I went to a concert with my daughter. Friday morning my wife woke me up at 2:30 a.m. in a panic, asking me to get up to board up the windows, worrying that I wouldn’t have enough time later in the morning. Having failed to get back to sleep, I got up around 6 a.m. to board up the windows. I finished around 11 a.m. The rain had yet to start, but the forecast was still calling for landfall in my back yard. My parents came over and we watched a couple of movies. By dinner time we learned that the storm and all of its effects went somewhere else. The most we saw was a little bit of rain. The storm warnings were discontinued and my parents went home.

We got lucky. In a way I feel good, but I feel bad that it was at someone else’s expense.

Now I’m back at work, everything strangely and unexpectedly back to normal.

So far, so good. The hurricane came ashore ahead of schedule, and well south of here. While we’re still forecast to get hurricane force winds here, it won’t be category three or four strength winds.

Me? I’ll take that.
—-sittTENDED BODY:

My office is empty, or nearly so. Here’s a scene from my office earlier this morning,

“Yeah, they’re expecting it to be a category two storm by the time it makes its forecasted landfall in the Tampa Bay area sometime tomorrow afternoon”

“Wait a minute; you’re saying there’s a hurricane?”

The office emptied out faster than you could say “preparedness.”

By the way, if you are trying to access this site over the next couple of days and notice it isn’t there, we may be suffering technical difficulties due to Hurricane Charley.

If the storm appears to be coming close tomorrow morning, I’ll likely be shutting down my server and posting a back-up of this blog at http://homepage.mac.com/johnkauffman/. (Right now there’s just a redirection page at this address which sends you my server at home.) In the mean time, wish us luck.