Hi.

So you might have seen that we’re in for a bit of rain down here.

Tropical Storm Hurricane Harvey (it went from TS to Cat-3 hurricane in about 7 hours) is moving toward the Texas coast tonight, and is supposed to make landfall tomorrow evening.

Trying to be both smart and pleasant about this one.

The meteorologists seem baffled by this storm though, and aren’t sure what it’s going to do. I watched a bit of its track this morning and and I’ve become a little concerned. Not about the storm making landfall, but rather that it never quite lands.

My worry is that, rather than acting like a normal hurricane, Harvey will spin along in an eponymously insane fashion right up the Texas coast, continuously pulling heat off the Gulf and wrecking/flooding along its way. I have no climatological data to back this theory up, other than having been through quite a few of these things.

The last major one I went through was back in ’08. Hurricane Ike. I’d just met the girl who would become my wife 20 days before the storm made landfall. And I met Alex for the first time during Ike.

“I fight storm. Get behind me.”

But, given that I have a wife and child to take care of these days, and given that I no longer have a vehicle capable of traversing heavily flooded roads…

The Jeep was a bit burlier than the Juke…

I can’t simply pick up some peanut butter and crackers with Gatorade and ride the thing out by reading books by candlelight.

So I did a “stock up” trip to the grocery store this morning. As such, the aforementioned Juke is currently inundated with bottled water, granola bars, lantern batteries, instant coffee, pasta, diapers, almonds, and yes…peanut butter and crackers.

Now it could very well be that all this is for nothing, and we’ll get a Rita rather than an Ike. (Houston peeps will get that reference.) But it’s one thing for me to stake my health on that prospect. It’s entirely different to risk the health of my wife and daughter on such a gamble.
That isn’t happening.

So?

So now I’m the guy in the mini-van, buying water and non-perishables for a storm.

*sigh*

And you know what? It all makes sense from here.

See you guys on the other side.

j.s.