To My Friends in the Path of Irene

For my friends who are in the path of Potentially Possibly Catastrophic Tropical Weather System of Some Sort Irene, here's hoping it goes easy on you and your cleanup work isn't terrible.

It has been a little serious here lately, so a little "funnin' around" is good for the soul.

Hurricanes are such a pain in the *ss.  Putting up shutters, taking care of things that might blow around or get wind damaged and all that junk before the storm, then the cleanup after the storm - chopping up broken branches or trees, repairing anything damaged - what a pain.   The only good point is that a hurricane is kind of a lazy man's disaster.  You see the scenes on TV of all the sheep cleaning out the grocery stores of bottled water and raiding the home supply stores for plywood and duct tape.  Me, I just have all that stuff around all the time.  I got metal shutters 15 years ago.  We have it down to being able to shut our house up like a clam in under an hour.  So all summer, I check the tropical forecasts every day - more often if there's something big and/or close.  Our hurricane drill?  When it looks like we're getting it, we put up shutters, take down ham antennas, move potted plants, garbage cans and a few other outdoor items into the garage, and pop a cold one.  The indoor stuff like making ice and charging batteries can be done for days in advance.

The thing about this one that I'm watching with interest (and glad to be a long way away from) is that it's going over some really densely populated cities with some bad areas.  From Baltimore up to NYC.  Most people don't even own cars so they can't get out of Dodge, no matter what Mayor Doomberg says.  If you stick 4 feet of flood water in those places and take down the power grid, they'll be eating each other inside of 3 days.