Sunday, August 28, 2005

Hell has no wrath...

...like divas named Katrina and when She's done with Louisiana, she's making a beeline for Middle Tennessee. One message in my email today said the category five storm is a 500 year event. The news reported this morning that at this rate, waves from the storm will be in the sixteen to twenty feet high range and the breakers built back in the sixties are only thirteen, so New Orleans has a good chance of being under a good amount of water.

There are people in Louisiana tonight who can't leave, for whatever reason. Please consider doing whatever it is you do for them, whether it's saying a prayer, working your mojo, or pointing at the sky and saying, "HEY!!! YOU!!! DO SOMETHING!!!!" Here's to hoping they're safe and sound when it's all over.

I guess I'll spend what I can of tomorrow battening down the hatches. Yesterday, Leland Statom said Katrina will still have tropical storm strength when she gets here. He also said that there is the potential for tornadoes with this storm.

All I can say is, "Ah, hell" and get to work.

This reminds me of another storm that hit when I was a kid. I don't know which hurricane it was but it parked it's cranky ass right over Middle Tennessee and stayed for three days. It had violent lightening, ear splitting thunder, crashing rain and howling winds the entire time. I also remember that by the second night, I was pretty cranky myself. I had a waterbed and my mom wouldn't let me sleep on it. I had to sleep with her on an old, hard, high bed that felt like I was sleeping ten feet off the ground (in reality, it was only about two and a half.) She thought I'd get electrocuted somehow by lightning running in on it, even though the heater wasn't plugged in or anything.

That plus my grandmother, who we lived with at the time, didn't want us to use the toilet during the storm. She swore that there had been a person that had been blown clean off the commode when a bolt of lightning ran in on it.

Let it be stated right here and now that I was an evil child. Whenever I heard my grandmother tell that story, I wasn't scared. No, far from it. I was always curious to know how in the world that could happen and I wanted to know who this unfortunate soul was. I also had a Monty Python-esque vision of the event in my head, which didn't help matters much when I started chuckling.

Yes, I was warped beyond all hope. Even then.


I wonder what she expected us to do instead?

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