Thursday, August 25, 2005
I'm tired of this hurricane stuff
It's funny how quickly your plans for the weekend can go downhill. Just throw a hurricane into the mix, basically.
I had this nice big weekend trip planned to South Florida that included a doctor appointment, a Green Day concert, and a Miami Dolphins game. And in all honesty, with the way my back has stiffened up over the past week, I think I was looking forward to the doctor appointment the most out of the three. Don't worry, I'll live. But I'm too young for this. I'm also too young for the grey hair, but that's another story. The real story here, of course, is that my intended destination just happens to be scheduled for a date with a hurricane this weekend.
And I to think that if I'd followed my original plan, I'd be driving into the heart of it right at this moment. Good thing I checked the news before I hit the road, as South Florida is now well into full shutdown mode. The doctor appointment has already been cancelled, I can't get any word one way or another about the concert, and the football game is still officially very tentatively scheduled to go on as planned. And although I was really looking forward to all of it, I'm mostly over it at this point. I just saw Green Day earlier this year, and the Dolphins game is merely a preseason game. So if I have to cut bait and stay home this weekend, well it would certainly be preferable to heading down there and getting trapped right in the middle of yet another hurricane.
And that's what's bothering me more than the weekend washing me out. I'm not ready for another hurricane season. Last year was enough for a lifetime. But I'm from Florida, I should be used to it, right? In a word, no. In the first twenty-six years of my life, all in South Florida, I had been through precisely one hurricane (Andrew '92). And then I move to inland Central Florida, which hadn't had a hurricane in something like five decades, and I promptly get whacked by three hurricanes in two months.
Because we're so far inland here, there's no evacuating, there's no fearing for your life. There's just locking yourself inside and waiting for it to pass while your life is completely shut down, and then waiting for things to slowly creep back to normalcy after it's gone. It's nine days in a row without electricity, it's traveling all around the landscape to find working internet access so you can keep your going concerns going, it's having every traffic signal in your town ripped off the power lines and seeing the national guard directing traffic. It's seeing the police driving around in tanks. It's having literallly half the roads in your town blocked by fallen trees. It's having the screens ripped off your porch, and not wanting to bother replacing them because they'll likely just get ripped off by the next storn next month. It's not fun. And it's not normal.
You can deal with something like that if you're pretty sure it's not going to happen again. But here we go again, it would seem. This first storm isn't here at all, hitting South Florida instead, but it's already screwing with my plans, interrupting things and making life difficult.
Here we go again? Let's hope not.
It's funny how quickly your plans for the weekend can go downhill. Just throw a hurricane into the mix, basically.
I had this nice big weekend trip planned to South Florida that included a doctor appointment, a Green Day concert, and a Miami Dolphins game. And in all honesty, with the way my back has stiffened up over the past week, I think I was looking forward to the doctor appointment the most out of the three. Don't worry, I'll live. But I'm too young for this. I'm also too young for the grey hair, but that's another story. The real story here, of course, is that my intended destination just happens to be scheduled for a date with a hurricane this weekend.
And I to think that if I'd followed my original plan, I'd be driving into the heart of it right at this moment. Good thing I checked the news before I hit the road, as South Florida is now well into full shutdown mode. The doctor appointment has already been cancelled, I can't get any word one way or another about the concert, and the football game is still officially very tentatively scheduled to go on as planned. And although I was really looking forward to all of it, I'm mostly over it at this point. I just saw Green Day earlier this year, and the Dolphins game is merely a preseason game. So if I have to cut bait and stay home this weekend, well it would certainly be preferable to heading down there and getting trapped right in the middle of yet another hurricane.
And that's what's bothering me more than the weekend washing me out. I'm not ready for another hurricane season. Last year was enough for a lifetime. But I'm from Florida, I should be used to it, right? In a word, no. In the first twenty-six years of my life, all in South Florida, I had been through precisely one hurricane (Andrew '92). And then I move to inland Central Florida, which hadn't had a hurricane in something like five decades, and I promptly get whacked by three hurricanes in two months.
Because we're so far inland here, there's no evacuating, there's no fearing for your life. There's just locking yourself inside and waiting for it to pass while your life is completely shut down, and then waiting for things to slowly creep back to normalcy after it's gone. It's nine days in a row without electricity, it's traveling all around the landscape to find working internet access so you can keep your going concerns going, it's having every traffic signal in your town ripped off the power lines and seeing the national guard directing traffic. It's seeing the police driving around in tanks. It's having literallly half the roads in your town blocked by fallen trees. It's having the screens ripped off your porch, and not wanting to bother replacing them because they'll likely just get ripped off by the next storn next month. It's not fun. And it's not normal.
You can deal with something like that if you're pretty sure it's not going to happen again. But here we go again, it would seem. This first storm isn't here at all, hitting South Florida instead, but it's already screwing with my plans, interrupting things and making life difficult.
Here we go again? Let's hope not.
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