The All Clear

The Hurricane is over.  Everyone return to your regularly scheduled sweating.  

Here is the extent of our damage:

Please note that this thirty-foot section of fence separating our back yard from our right-hand neighbor’s back yard was completely rotten prior to Hurricane Dolly.  She just finished off two boards.  We thought briefly about going out during the worst of the wind and pushing down the rest of it. 

But then we started doing this.   Can anyone guess what we’re using for tile spacers (because we were too cheap to shell out the $2.39 for a bag of fifty spacers so that we could set six tiles)?

Drip, Drip, Drip, Goes the Water

That’s a Chumbawamba song, from the Tubthumper album.

Anyway, during my first hour of measuring, my fancy pluviometer measured about 20 mm of rain.  That included at least two waves of rain bands.

The second hour saw both a lull in the rain and an increase in winds, and I measured only about 3 mm of rain.  The blusterier it gets, the less accurate my delicate fluviograph.  

Hours three and four, trace.  Maybe one mm.  Maybe.

Hey look! Watermelon!

This beauty was 36.5 pounds and grew at the family compound in Central Texas.  Lovely.  

Raindrops on roses

It’s been raining all day.  It woke me for the first time at six.  It comes in waves: a light, steady rain, punctuated by spells of rain coming down in buckets and sheets.  Our nearest weather station suggests that we have accumulated rain at .36 inches or 9 mm per hour.  I’ve instituted my own rudimentary weather station on the back patio.  It’s a one liter beaker, connected by my brain to a kitchen timer set for one hour.  I’ll let you know.  

The wind is fairly mild now, anywhere from 5 mph (9km/h) up to 27 mph (43 km/h), but is expected to rise as the storm makes landfall down the coast.  This tricky monster has given everyone a bit of a scare.  At first, Dolly was zooming through the Caribbean, hopping the Yucatan peninsula without a backward glance, and zooming through the Gulf of Mexico.  As it got a little closer to landfall (which was forecast anywhere from Tampico, Mexico to Corpus Christ, Texas) it’s speed dropped by more than half, allowing it to grow and develop over the warm, ripe-for-hurricane Gulf waters.  Forecasts varied widely yesterday about landfall time, strength and location, but late yesterday, the meteorological types figured they had it pegged to go ashore at Brownsville, Texas in that city’s first direct-hit in over a decade.  

But whoops.  Fooled you, serious, meteorological types.  Dolly slowed even further, got even stronger, becoming a Category 2 storm (meaning lower pressure, stronger winds) and started hugging the coast, the eyewall gliding along the barrier island, winking at Brownsville as it went by.  

Its eye is more like a gaping maw, opening and closing as it slides up the coast to cross over the barrier island where?  Harlingen?  Raymondville?  Falfurrias?!!

That would be getting a little close for our comfort.  But we should remember that this is Mother Nature we’re dealing with.  The elements of pressure and temperature stirring up the moisture in not-entirely-predictable ways.  We’re still not worried.  We have chocolate and good things to drink and some spicy food to look forward to and best of all, good company.  

Rendezvous with some wind

Two part post.

Part One.

For the first time in eight years, no child was sleeping in the house with us last night.  Nor will there be one tomorrow night or the next night, etc., all the way to the weekend.  We left them at the side of the road.  Ok, no, we left them at grandma’s.   Where they will be completely spoiled because grandma loves them completely and will do absolutely anything for them.  This trip was planned last week, completely ignorant of the possibility of a hurricane.  (More on the hurricane later.)

Leaving them up there was very difficult.  They’re about five hours away by highway.  The two older Sonars have each spent time at grandma’s, but this was the first stay for Sonar X3 without us.  And the first time for all three of them to be away from us at the same time.  Walking away from my kids, whether for a few minutes or a few hours or a few days is difficult for me.  I always feel this horrible tugging feeling that makes me want to get all teary.  But then I don’t want them to feel bad for wanting to do whatever it is they want to do without me, in this case hanging out with grandma for a week.  So I put on my brave face and try not to get teary until after I get in the car and wave cheerfully and turn the corner.  

I’m not saying that I get this way every time I leave them somewhere—I have an almost-third-grader and if I got teary every time he went to school I think I’d have a problem.  But leaving them when I know I can’t be there in a few minutes.  Leaving them for a week.  Leaving them somewhere for the first (or maybe even the second or third time), well, that’s a little bit of a challenge for me.  

But.  It is good for us.  It’s good for me to miss then and know that all of the times I want to choke them aren’t really worth the choking because I really do like to have them around.  It’s good for them to grow and have experiences and develop relationships that are separate from me.  

And.  Well, it’s nice to be alone with that guy over there.  To spend some extended time with him that is independent of schedules and is just about him and me communicating with each other and hanging out and doing things and just being together.  It’s been nice so far.   

We went to a movie theater together today.  Did I mention we went together?  Both of us at the same time?  With no kids in tow?  To a real grown-up (well, sort of) movie, at the same time.  For the first time in EIGHT years.  It was so cool.  And yes, the movie was good too.  The Dark Knight.  Christian Bale is too hot for words.  And Heath Ledger’s Joker is one of the scariest characters I’ve ever seen on film.  

We’re going to do some work around here too.  Maybe.  And the Sonars will be back this weekend, just in time for Partner’s summer break to wind down.  He’ll head back to oppressing the masses in public education next week.  But for now, he’s just a guy I really like to hang out with.  Who gets recognized by every teenager in town when we go out.

Part Two

Hurricane Dolly is expected to make landfall near the Texas/Mexico border sometime tomorrow afternoon or evening.  This is good (for us) because it’s several hundred miles down the Gulf Coast from us.  It’s not so good for the people down around Brownsville and Harlingen who, though it’s not a big storm, are preparing for the worst and hoping for the best (I am hoping for the best for them too).  

We are on the rainy side of the storm (a tropical storm sucks up moisture on one side of its rotation, leaving that side miserably dry and hot, and dumps it, like a big rain machine, on its wet side—check here or here for everything you never wanted to know about tropical monsters).  Our last close call with a Storm was Erin 2007, which passed by us up the coast, leaving us on the dry side.  We have evacuated only once in the 3+ years that we’ve lived here, for Rita 2005 (you might have heard of her; she followed Katrina), though we ended up on her dry side too.

Dolly’s first rain bands have passed over us, though we’ve had no rain so far at our house.  The steady rain should start sometime tonight, and—if it goes as forecast currently—carry on through most of tomorrow and part of Thursday, leaving us several inches wetter and a bit blustered.  

When I first moved to this part of Texas, I was completely freaked out about Hurricanes.  I mean, seriously, growing up in New Mexico, severe weather was not a reality for me.  And even in Pennsylvania for several years, where we had to prepare for the occasional fierce winter storm, we didn’t worry too much as long as we had food and water.  We just put on our warmest jammies and stayed in bed until it was time to shovel snow.  We didn’t worry about whether the house would still be standing when the storm passed.  

I have better perspective on things now.  First, a house is just a house.  If it blows down, well, as long as we’re safe, our lives will go on.  It’s just stuff.  So we do what is appropriate for any given storm (boarding up windows, for instance, if it’s a stronger storm, hoarding food and water and batteries if we’re going to hunker down; packing a kit of essential papers and belongings if we’re going to evacuate).  Preparing for the worst, and hoping for the best, and generally trying not to panic or overreact.  Second, a hurricane doesn’t exactly sneak up on you.  It’s not a tornado, that can pop up and surprise you.  It’s a big lumbering beast of a storm, and with modern data and forecasting, we always know when they’re coming, and within a few hundred miles, where they’re coming, and approximately how strong and what kind of damage they might do.  

That said, knowing the kids are out of the inland path of the storm also makes me worry less about this one.  When we evacuated for Rita, I had an infant with an ear infection and no pharmacies open within a hundred miles able to fill his antibiotic prescription.  Though the storm was starting to track up the coast, evacuation had been recommended and in a post-Katrina frenzy, that evacuation of the Texas coast was, well, let’s say less than orderly and ideal.  But evacuate we did, in order to make sure the littlest Sonar could get some relief and that the other Sonars could be in a safe place no matter what happened.  

This time, I know they’re safe.  No one has an ear infection.  In fact, I know they’re having a good time, swimming, making rock candy, watching trashy tv, and eating junk food with grandma.  That assurance makes it easy for me to sit in the front yard with Partner, sipping a beer, secure in the notion that we can handle a storm.  

Now, if only we managed to put together a couple of rain barrels ahead of the rain.

Rolling out the red carpet

Hello Dolly.