16 September 2004
Currently there is a tornado warning out there, it’s windy and raining. The glass doors on the fireplace blow open from time to time.
Our back deck this morning
We got the Auburn University central computers down last night at about 11 – the library servers were shut down before we left for the day at 5 pm. When this passes, and we are more certain of power, then we go back in and bring things back up. That’s one thing about this area – weather can cause the electricity to go away all together too frequently.
We are in that lovely orange zone on the weather map…. the medium chance of wind damage. Tell that to the the little dogwood in the backyard that seems to stand at a funny angle right now.
And, to make things worse, Grace, sweet thing that she is, just brought us a lovely dead squirrel. It’s disposed of now. Who knows how it met its demise: a cat or drowned in the storm?
Oh well.
14 September 2004
OK – it’s hurricane week again – First we watched Charley – and got some rain. And, we watched Frances developing while Charley was ravaging Central Florida.
Then, we braced for Frances within a week or 10 days. (And we noticed Ivan’s strength building). We got lots of rain, not too terribly much wind… out came the stuff from the shed where it had been stashed against the possibility of wind.
That was last week. Here it is 8 days later, and we are battening down the hatches because of Ivan. Every time NOAA reevalutes the predicted path, it manages to curve or straighten so that Auburn AL lies in the center of the projected path…. something tells me to learn the lessons of Opal, which was still a hurricane when it passed thru here in 1996.
We have bottled water, 2 bottles of propane and a really nice gas grill plus lots of canned goods. And, we’ll start moving everything back into the shed tomorrow.
Watch this space for reports. And pray for Mobile and Baldwin counties… and every thing east and west of them.
2 September 2004
Thought you might like to know what the weather is like here in east Alabama – we’re sitting in the projected path of Frances… this should change thru the weekend.
Update: Frances seems to have slowed a bit, so we think we’ll see effects on Monday night and Tuesday now. At least the weather folks don’t predict that she will blow thru a hurricane force like Opal or Eloise.
Update: Tuesday morning, 13 September 2004: No matter how NOAA and the hurricane specialists move the projected track of Ivan, it seems like we will get strong winds and lots of rain. So we are in the process of collecting bottled water, canned food (which I hope to be able to donate to a food drive at a later date!) and preparing for some rought weather somewhere around Thursday and Friday.
This is 3 storms in about 4 or 5 weeks. A bumper crop this year… perhaps the effects of global warming?
