Something Unexciting, and Probably Not Completely Different

Well, Gustav is blowing through, and I’m actually a little scared.  Just about every tree has dropped, at my guess, 1/3 of its branches.  Some have cracked halfway up; others just dropping limbs as big as a 16 inches in diameter.  I live in an older neighborhood, full of trees, which is what makes it so wonderful, until a day like today, and then it’s just downright scary.  3-4 more hours to go…  Every time the wind changes, a new set of limbs drop.  One fairly large tree, on our property line, just in front of both my house and my neighbors, just broke halfway up and fell just onto the edge of our neighbors house.  Hopefully not too much damage, but you can’t really tell because the whole thing is as tall as the house.  (They are ok.)  Gonna be fun to clean all this up…

Today, I’m sitting around the house, waiting for Gustav to come and go.  The transformer around the block has groaned at least 4 times already this morning, so I’m guessing the neighborhood will be without power, shortly.  So far, things have been relatively calm.  We’ve had several inches of rain, and a ton of small twigs, leaves and branches clear out of the trees.  Every little bump or thump makes me look up out of the windows.

It’s funny how people have different attitudes about hurricanes.  I grew up here; to me, they are big nasty storms that you prepare for a little, and then you just wait through them.  Sometimes you come out just fine, sometimes you lose something.  Or everything.  It’s just part and parcel of living down here.  To be fair, Baton Rouge is the first stop out of the evacuation zone – so what we get is not even comparable to what the true coastal zones take.  I’ve never evacuated, never left everything behind knowing full well it might not be there when I returned.

My husband is from California and Texas, and his attitude is wholly different.  Maybe it’s just the humidity down here, but he views losing power for a few days or a week as about the worst thing that can happen, short of our house being destroyed.  To me, it’s an opportunity to really clean out the fridge.  Getting a gas-line automatic generator seriously eased his nervousness about personal discomfort; we’ll have just about everything except our washer and dryer, unless something breaks a gas line.  Our refrigerator may not get cleaned in its lifetime.

EOC and LSU this time are completely on the ball.  I assume part of it is our change in governmental leadership, and part of it is the lessons we learned from Katrina.  My husband works at the EOC during emergencies – one of his office’s functions is geological mapping, so he helps provide maps of water levels along with a whole bunch of other stuff.  He said that EOC yesterday (1 day prior) was already at the same point as it was 2 days after Katrina passed.  LSU put out a call for volunteers ahead of time, has announced closure through Wednesday, and really prepared campus for those staying as well as those who will be sheltering there.  So I think the state is in good shape.

Now there’s nothing to do but wait for it to pass…