The Preparations Continue
Slowly but surely Gustav advances, as do the preparations.
Walking through the town, Ruston is dead. Admittedly, it is a Sunday, but it seems more dead than usual. People are making or have already made their last trips to the store for essentials before the hurricane hits.
New Orleans is evacuated. Last time I looked, 54 out of the 64 parishes (Louisiana counties) in Louisiana have declared states of emergency.
Over the past few days, I have watched the different hurricane models on Weather Underground change from a discordant group of assorted predictions to agreement on one thing: this behemoth is going to make landfall right in my back yard.
Where it goes after it hits the coast makes no difference to me; I was just hoping that it wouldn't make its entry right here on the coast.
The weather has always been one of my interests. I spent a good portion of the day readying my weather station in Alexandria for the hurricane, and ensuring that it will remain operational for as long as possible during the hurricane. I've been remotely performing updates and verifying that the tools I will need to keep the station up are available.
You can access my station here. I am going to try to keep the Internet connection for the station up as long as possible, but when the power goes out, all non-essential services will be stopped. This includes the Internet connection and Weathercam. All data will be logged for transmission as soon as the power and Internet connection come back online.
If possible, I will provide short updates through the storm. I don't know if my Internet connection here will work, or if we will keep power. Only time will tell.
Gustav, with Gusto
Hurricane Gustav is heading this way.
Around the 3-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, it seems like déjà vu.
I'm not going to debate the merits of living in New Orleans, an area below sea level today. Gustav is supposed to strengthen to a Category 5 storm, then make landfall as a Category 4.
Of course, where it will make landfall is still anyone's guess. But, even though I'm in northern Louisiana, I am prepared. I always try to be prepared, though, even if I don't think anything is going to happen. It's a good plan to be ready at all times.
For example, I didn't even have to go to the grocery store to buy food or to the store to buy batteries and water--I keep that kind of stuff on hand, just in case.
I canned some fresh tomatoes today. Home canning is one of the simplest ways to preserve food, and it's smart because it doesn't require any type of refrigeration or other special treatment to keep it edible. It's generally a great way to keep food in uncertain conditions. Even though I have water and we have ready access to water here, I canned some water, too, mostly just to see if it could be done. Sure enough, the lids sealed like they were supposed to.
Of course, for me at least, being prepared and being ready is the easy part. The hard part is the waiting, the uncertainty, and the indecision of what is going to happen. There are still a few models of the storm that show it veering to the left before it makes landfall and going in somewhere in Texas. If that happens, chances are we won't get much of anything up here. Maybe some rain, and definitely a bit of wind, but that's about it.
It made me start thinking today. Many years ago, without satellite imagery, how would we have even known there was a hurricane out there, much less its sustained wind speeds, direction of travel, and its track? Without the aid of modern technology, I would have no clue that there was a storm. It was a typical hot, moist, sticky Louisiana day today, much like any other.
Slowly, though, plodding along at 15mph, Gustav marches onward toward land.
The Olympics are Over. Now What?
Now that the Olympics are over, the world will see China's true colors.
How many of the changes and improvements they have made are just for show?
Will any of the progress stick?
Both of these questions and more will be answered in the next few years.
China with the olympics had a major chance--the chance of a lifetime, really--to show the world what it can do. And show it did, though not without some complications and hitches.
Now that the Olympics are over, the dust will settle, the Bird's Nest stadium will become a national sports arena, and presumably everyone will be allowed to drive every day. Gone are the restrictions to make the environment more healthful for the athletes that were engaged in grueling, split-second competition.
But the citizens never left. What about the people in the People's Republic of China? What about their lungs? What about their performance? What about their health? What about their life?
Hopefully China will see this and make some of the changes stick.
It seems in part that the giant country was so busy trying to impress the world that it neglected some of its own constitutents.
What a hollow victory that will be for them.
The Red Phone
As any of my friends can tell you, sometimes I obsess over things.
Well, obsess is probably too kind of a word for the immense and unwavering fixation of something that catches my fancy.
This time, it was a phone.
We live in an age of cordless this, cordless that, caller ID, and answering machines. I'm usually someone who isn't quite at the bleeding edge of technology, but isn't that far behind, either.
So, it's really a strange phenomenon that an old-fashioned, corded phone caught my fancy.
I don't know if it was a nod to my childhood or what, but I wanted one of those phones.
You know the type. The big ones with a real bell ringer and the handset that nestles in a cradle across the top of the phone. The kind that was on every office worker's desk for the longest time, and the kind you usually see in hotel rooms around the United States.
I had one of those phones "back in the day," but my Dad thought the ringer was too loud. So, he disconnected the ringer from the inside of the phone with a pair of wire clippers.
About 4 years ago, while trying to put it back together so it would make the sound that I remembered so clearly, I realized that the way my father had cut the wire, it would be nearly impossible to repair. I think that might have been what planted the seed that grew in to an all-out obsession that came to fruition today.
I wanted one, but I thought for sure that they wouldn't be made any more. I started on eBay, and found them bid up to obscene (to me, at least) amounts. No dice there.
After figuring out the model of my questing beast (it was a Cortelco ITT-2500-V, formely made by International Telegraph and Telephone), I stumbled accross a site that had good reviews and reasonable shipping called SmithGear.com. At that point, I had what I wanted, but I had to do the thing that I have the most trouble with when selecting anything: I had to pick a color.
Curses!
Did I want white? No, too easy to dirty and would show fingerprints. Did I want ivory? Ehhh. Did I want ash? What kind of color is ash? Apparently it's some weird dark ivory-beigeish color. Or, did I want red?
At first thought, I really wanted the ash, because that's the closest to what I remembered from my childhood. But, on second thought, I realized that I was the master of my own destiny. I could pick any color in the world that I wanted, as long as it was white, ivory, ash, or red.
Oh, red. It came to me in a rush. What better way to proclaim my rebellion against technology with a phone that serves one purpose only than with a bright, bold red?
Plus, it matches my red Swingline stapler.
And it came in today.
It's the one in the foreground, obviously.
Ants!
"I think we have an ant problem," my roommate said to me over the phone.
"What do you mean? There's no open food in the kitchen," I replied.
"I don't know where the little bastards are going or where they're coming from. I've tried to track them, but the trail just ends. I think they're in the wall," he said.
Great. Just great, I thought. He moves in a few days before me and already has the place so trashed that there are ants everywhere. That's why we left our other apartment. One of our other roommates would leave the place filthy.
Before I left for the summer, I went shopping for nonperishable, sealed foods. The theory being that when I returned, I would already have some of my grocery shopping done.
I moved in, and the apartment was surprisingly clean. Surprisingly clean for the ant problem that we were having, that is.
I proceeded to put away everything that I had brought up, which is quite a new idea for me.
This year, I'm trying, as the old adage goes, to have a place for everything, and everything in its place.
I had been watching a bit of television, fussing around the room getting things in order and hooking up all of my electronics and running cords. Finally, after all of the dust settled both figuratively and literally, I decided it was time for bed. And what better to do right before bed then have a nice big cup of tea?
I was pretty tired by this point. I poured a cup of water into my Hot Shot water heater, and hit the heat button. Next, I walked over to my closet to grab a teabag out of my pantry. I pulled the box of Celestial Seasonings Sleepytime tea forward to look behind it for another tea, and saw a few ants run away.
Great.
"Well, it's only a few ants," I thought to myself. "I'll deal with that tomorrow."
Riiiight.
I picked up the box of tea, and there were more ants under it. "This is getting better by the second," I thought. So much for a relaxing cup of tea and a good night's sleep.
I moved another box of tea (of which I have a quite extensive collection) and found a pile of something that looked like sawdust. These were small sugar ants, not termites, so I knew there was a pretty good chance it wasn't sawdust.
"What food do I have that looks like that?" I mused to myself.
Turns out almost every food in my pantry had at least one component that looked like sawdust. Turns out it was my Organic Brown Sugar and Maple Syrup Toaster Pastries. Completely sealed, mind you, but apparently the ants saw it fit to gnaw a hole through the wrapper to get to the sugary goodness on the interior.
With my roommate manning the vacuum cleaner switch and me at the hose, we methodically swept the whole cabinet for ants, vacuuming up their piles of toaster pastry and as many of them as we could find.
Suffice it to say at the end of this ordeal:
a) I was no longer tired
b) my room looks like a train wreck
Great. Looks like I know what I'm going to be doing tonight, but at least I can end it with a nice, relaxing cup of tea.