My inner clock is still not quite reset from the Copenhagen trip. Woke up at 3:30, wide awake, so of course I'm looking around at Gustav info. The satellite TV has been fritzy and I can't get The Weather Channel, which is probably a good thing since they seem to me to be prone to hysterics. I called repair yesterday just to see if they could do anything for the TV since I don't think it's at all hurricane related. They scheduled a service call for me Monday morning. Yeah, right, like that will happen. I wish we could get cable here.
Hysteric or no, this storm is clearly headed this way, and from the models it looks like the BR area will be on the business end of it. We're far enough inland not to have to worry about the really really high winds, but gusts of 60-70 mph are likely, and as much as 10 inches of rain. One model has a veer off to the east, but the rest of the "spaghetti" comes in somewhere around St. Mary Parish. I have been looking at the LDOT cameras to see how evacuation is going on the interstates, and at this wee hour it looks like coming out of NO is pretty heavy. NO has mandatory evacuation starting in a few hours, so it will just get worse. I'm very glad we got our supplies in so we can stay off the roads.
I went to the Wallyworld in Brusly yesterday to see about some supplies--we were short on Hattie's food, bird food, etc., stuff the local grocery doesn't carry. Wallyworld was a madhouse--water, beer, cokes, etc. flying off the shelves. I never understand this, but all the bread gets bought up first. I mean, one fully expects the flashlight display to be stripped bare, but bread? How many sandwiches can one possibly eat during a storm? WW had brought in a lot of extra flats of water and stuff. But no gas cans, and we could have used a couple. I also wanted some of those huge cheap candles that have saints on the glass they're in, but those were long gone. I wanted some D batteries which are dreadfully hard to find, looked in every little battery display, maddeningly scattered around the store, and was on my way to the checkout when I saw a knot of people around several cartons of batteries that had evidently just come in. By the time I got my 2 packs there was a crowd of people grabbing, some of them just taking pack after pack. Ugly, but you never know what people are facing.
After all that I topped off my gas tank. On this side of the river they don't appear to be price-gouging, but I hear over in the burbs on the EBR side gas is going up up up and in places to the west all you can find is premium. Ironic, since we're producing so much of the country's petroleum. I heard on one news report that oil pumping will go on until 12 hours before landfall. That's ridiculous, and if I were in that line of work, I'd say so and get away. Of course the offshore folks are already evacuated.
Classes are cancelled Tuesday and I bet that stretches into the week. I'm on the volunteer list for the PMAC evac center, which is already filling up with medical evacuations. We invited Gary's mom to come stay with us, dangling the generator as incentive, but she's waiting to decide because she doesn't like to leave her house. If she doesn't come here, hopefully she will go to Gary's sister's.
Once the sun comes up we'll do some more battening of hatches. Gary's going to pile everything he can from his shop in the garage in the middle of the floor and cover it with tarp. We're not sure the garage roof will stand up to the wind, and since most of the windows are already broken we'll just have to do what we can to protect his tools. I hope the kitties have sense enough to go back under the house. Sonny the parrot will move inside today. I hope he doesn't shriek during the storm; it just makes it worse.
So we'll be as ready as we can be. We've not weathered a storm yet at Grey Gardens LA. To me that's the biggest personal concern--not knowing what it will be like here. For Katrina and Rita, when we lived in BR, we were very close to neighbors, and everyone on the block looked out for one another. Here our neighbors are much further away, and the closest one is a petrochemical plant. As long as we can remain somehow plugged in--generator for a few hours a time to run the refrigerator and charge up the laptop and cell phones--I'll feel better about it.
