As Ready As We Can Be

We spent most of yesterday making final preparations for Hurricane Ian to come calling. The first order of business was to run to Publix and pick up a few things we needed, and I was surprised that the store wasn’t more crowded than it was. It was busy, but the panic buyers had either already been there and left or hadn’t arrived yet. Judging by the empty shelves and the employees working on restocking them, I think I was probably between waves of buyers. Then we went across the street to Walgreens to pick up a prescription Terry needed before coming home.

Back at home, we started storing away things outside that could become missiles in the wind, putting the big rollout garbage can and the recycle bins inside the garage, along with some planters and some other things. We have a big heavy hose on a faucet in the front of the house that it’s been there since we moved in, and I decided I wanted to put it away, too. That was a mistake, because as soon as I started to unscrew it from the faucet, the PVC pipe coming out the side of the house broke off in my hand, and water was shooting everywhere. Terry ran inside to turn the water off, and fortunately, that faucet and the garage are on one line, so she could turn them off and still have water in the rest of the house.

With everything inside, I put sandbags in front of my office door and the garage door in case of possible flooding. Either I’m getting older, or those bags are getting heavier. I’m not sure which.

When we were done with that, we went across the street and put everything away for an elderly neighbor so she wouldn’t have to mess with it. Somewhere along the line, it had started to rain pretty steadily, so we were soaked by the time we got back home. I was pretty well covered in dirt and grime and decided to take a shower to cool off and clean up at the same time. When I got in the shower, I looked down and saw that I had company. No thanks, buddy. Some things I need to do by myself, and you need to go.

The storm’s predicted path is moving again. Originally, once it started jogging eastward, they said it would come up the center of the state. Then, yesterday afternoon, it shifted a little more to the east. We are the blue dot in this photograph, which meant we were out of the direct path but still in the cone and would be getting a lot of wind and rain.

Then, by 11 PM the track had moved even further to the east, taking the storm directly over us. We are just a few miles south of Daytona Beach. Well, darn! That’s not so good!

The good news is that it’s going to take 24 hours or more from the time it makes landfall on the southwest coast of Florida until it gets to us. Once the storm gets over land, it starts to lose power quickly, and by then, it should not be a hurricane anymore. We are between Edgewater and Oak Hill, and as this screen shot shows, we can expect winds between 40 and 60 mph and up to 15 inches of flooding. The weather map shows that we will start getting heavy rain early this morning, and it will keep up until sometime Thursday evening.

By midday yesterday the highways were clogged with people evacuating, and gas stations throughout the region were out of fuel, so it doesn’t make any sense to try to make a run for it and wind up being stuck somewhere in the line of storms. We will ride it out and add it to our long list of life experiences. We have been in tornadoes, an earthquake, and forest fires, so I guess we’ll just add the hurricane merit badge to our collection.

Thought For The Day – I am on my second guardian Angel. The first one quit and is now in therapy.