Glued to the Weather Channel

yeah, more bitching about the tropics... but i've seen the same graphic several times today, and no one on the weather channel talks about dauphin island. they're like, "what the hell is dauphin island?" anyway, they keep showing the wind speeds for the areas affected by tropical storm cindy, and they include dauphin island on the graphic (68 mph winds last night/this morning, in case you were wondering), but they skip it and only talk about mobile, biloxi, cities people may have heard of. it's weird to me because all of the local stations focus on dauphin island, as it is a barrier island and sees the brunt of any storm before it makes its way to land. yet the weather channel seems to pretend the island where i spend so much of my precious time doesn't exist, even though they put it on my tv screen.

...and now they're comparing dennis and ivan. yeah, we remember ivan. it takes more than 10 months to forget something so many people are still recovering from. i don't think i'll ever forget ivan, unfortunately. yeah, dennis is pretty much taking the exact same path ivan did, so far (and probably when it makes landfall, too). one positive difference is that ivan was a category 4 hurricane with 150 mph winds at the same location, whereas dennis is a category 1 with 80 mph winds. i'm not letting that fool me, though. dennis still has most of the caribbean and all of the gulf of mexico to strengthen. there is still a (faint) hope for me that it will decide it doesn't really want to hit me and will go after texas instead. i say it's a faint hope, though, because according to USA's meteorology dept (which had the most accurate hurricane models i'd seen for past hurricanes - it was better than the weather channel's model for ivan), dennis is headed for mobile, baby. mobile. dammit.

for the benefit of my reader(s) who may or may not be very familiar with tropical activity, this season is not normal. we don't usually have this many named storms by early july (it's only been hurricane season for a little more than a month, for crying out loud!), and they don't usually all enter the gulf of mexico, and three out of the first four named storms certainly don't usually make a beeline for the central northern gulf coast (i.e., my territory) all within a few weeks of each other. this is especially out of the ordinary since we took such a hard hit from ivan last season. i really didn't expect to get targeted this much this year. i thought maybe we'd see a tropical storm, but two tropical storms and a hurricane??? by early july??? hell no. ugh. at this rate, i'm not going to make it to the end of hurricane season at the end of november... that's so far away.

hmm. dennis is now expected to reach category 2-3 strength tomorrow. how much does that suck? its winds are now at 85 mph, if anyone was wondering, and it hasn't even hit jamaica yet. all right, i'm totally in hurricane mode now. i can't make myself stop watching the weather channel... and i have to teach tomorrow afternoon (*yay*). i'm not sure how effective i'll be, since i didn't get much sleep last night, or the night before (but that was not due to anything tropical). now, with all the worrying over hurricane dennis, i'm too nervous and wound up to sleep very much. i think we'll go to st. joe this weekend, but i don't want to get stuck in all the "getting the hell out of town" traffic that i'm sure to encounter sunday from every town between port st. joe and dauphin island. then i'll have my own "getting the hell out of town before this thing kicks my ass" driving to do. *sigh* if only i could just take off friday afternoon and beat the mad rush out of here. it took three hours to make the (usually) hour and fifteen minute drive from mobile to flomaton in september when i was running (unsuccessfully and not very far away) from ivan.

grr. ok. taking my dennis frustrations elsewhere now. good night, all.