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Ernesto goes to Florida

Yesterday morning, out of nowhere, my mom said, “We’re under a hurricane watch.”

Ah yes, it’s that time of year again when hurricane activity is in full swing. Today, Tropical Storm Ernesto is heading toward us. As you might imagine, yesterday at school, the place was abuzz with talk of school closures and whatnot. In one of my classes, someone switched on the TV just in time for us to read, as one, the crawling text along the bottom: “‘Broward… County… schools… closed… Tuesday’!” Teachers altered their plans for tests and things. Nobody was really sure how much time we would have off, so everything was tentative.

So here I am on a Tuesday morning, not being at school. It’s not too bad yet; in fact, the weather’s pretty nice. I made ham and eggs for breakfast. One of the local TV stations is on in the other room and they’re in hurricane mode: there’s a little radar loop in the corner, announcements about shelters and closures are flying across the bottom of the screen, and they’re cutting to the weatherman every five seconds.

If you’re not familiar with the way they usually report tropical storms and hurricanes, it can be kind of frustrating. Whenever a new advisory comes in, the weather guy or gal stands up at the big map and shows you where the storm is. It’s represented by a tiny spiral shape. That actually marks the center of circulation, which may or may not be the center of the storm. They do the same thing when they show the forecast cone, which shows the storm’s possible track as a cone that widens as it gets farther away. With Ernesto, the center of circulation is way off in what seems to be the “side” of the storm. It’s as if you took a big, round hurricane and got rid of all the clouds except in one corner. That makes reading those maps tricky. There’s a much better view that shows the wind speeds around the center and shows where those areas of high wind speed are likely to go. After all, a hurricane is mainly a wind event, usually not so much of a rain event.

Anyway, I happened to glance at the TV a little while ago and I caught some “Breaking News.” They’ve made the decision that Broward County schools will be closed tomorrow as well. It’s a good thing, because even though the storm appears to be moving quickly on the radar, we haven’t seen any of it yet, and I don’t think it’s expected to go away until tomorrow morning.

So the schedule for today is to batten down the hatches, and I guess tomorrow will be the day that we’ll have to clean stuff up. We’ll probably be back in school on Thursday, but I can’t say for sure. Hopefully I’ll at least have time to do the homework that I probably should have done after school yesterday.

By the way, making the Beowulf movie over the weekend was a tremendous amount of fun, but I haven’t posted it to Google Video yet because it’ll take a really long time to upload it, and I’ll need to be on call for bringing in patio furniture, mowing the lawn (yes, I’m going to have to do that), and maybe putting up shutters. Once this whole tropical storm thing goes away, I’ll upload it and do a write-up. Or maybe I’ll upload it if I have time later today. Actually, I guess I could do it right after I post this. Yeah, that’s what I’ll do.

Now for some Ask Jordon.

Justin: If a whale and a mountain got into a fight, which would win?

In short, I think the mountain would win, no matter what. If the whale were on the mountain, it would probably die pretty quickly and then smell. If the mountain were on the whale (as in a rockslide or something) then the whale might not be fast enough to avoid getting crushed or at least bruised pretty badly. But then you might have a partially crumbled mountain and a somewhat injured whale. In that case, I’d call it a tie.

natasha: What do you think most guys prefer: blondes or brunettes? Or is that just a shallow way to choose who you think is hot?

I don’t really know if most guys prefer either. As far as I’m concerned, hair color means nothing. It might be important to some guys, but I think that a girl isn’t necessarily more or less hot because of the color of her hair. It’s really shallow to judge people by how they look. Well, even saying that they’re “hot” is pretty shallow, I think. I hope that made sense.

The latest in fake conspiracy theories: Belgium Doesn’t Exist!

Three years ago: “Well, I just got off the phone with her, and I have to say, it’s going to be a good article.”