"It's coming right for us!" - Jimbo, South Park

 

Oh, sure, Mother Nature looks all nice and pretty now, but Mother Nature is no lady, she’s an anthropomorphic construct, who really got mad if you fooled her with margarine that she thought was butter.

On Sunday The Mrs. and I were enjoying a quiet dinner out in a nice (I sprung for one where you actually have to wear shoes, which is upscale for me) restaurant in celebration of our fifteen-thousandth anniversary (the fifteen-thousandth is the Fermian Anniversary, so if you’re buying us gifts, make sure that they’re made of elements less stable than Christian Slater). The Boy and Pugsley, having been secured to a closet door with duct tape put in the care of Alia S. Wilder, allowed us to do something that we never do – linger over dinner, slowly quaffing (if one can slowly quaff) the nice wine with dinner while the waiter brought us things we couldn’t even pronounce, and in some cases, recognize.

I chomped on a delicious bit of something green. I thought to myself, that I owed a debt of thanks to all those ancient dudes who did all the tough leg work in that ancient gameshow “Poison or Not.” The Mrs. and I had some good stuff. (I originally wrote “Hey, thanks to all those ancestors, but I think that Darwin removed the losers.)

Anyhow, I’d promised to take The Mrs. to dinner and a movie. The dinner part was okay, but The Mrs. didn’t really want to take in the movie: “I can’t see, I can’t pause it, and they get upset when you drink inside the theater.”

Hard logic to refute, so I didn’t. We were enjoying a rare pleasant summer evening (pleasant temperatures in Houston equate to not feeling like a well-cooked pot-roast after five minutes outside) and The Mrs. suggested we go buy some champagne (it’s not pronounced at all like it’s spelled, by the way, and I got caught on that once) and head home to play violent video games wherein you kill alien attackers, watch a horror movie about a Mayan temple, and then watch a cartoon about Johnny Quest™ gone bad (Venture Brothers®, on Cartoon Network – recommended if you wondered what happens when super-science is in the hands of failures).

This explains why I didn’t post last night. The Mrs. demanded me all to herself.

Wow. How did I get lucky and snag The Mrs.? More duct tape.

Anyhow, as we got home, I pulled up the Intarwebs and found that Houston is straight in the path of a tropical storm, named Edouard. I don't know why the meteorologists named it Edouard, probably had some extra vowels lying about. Prior to moving here, I thought of tropical storms as nice fuzzy things that were gentle breezes and light rains. No. It turns out that tropical storms are embryonic hurricanes.

Now, having lived through all manner of natural weather (-55°F to 115°F, shark-hail, tornados, 90 mph sustained straight-line wind, raining zebra spleens, etc.) but I’ve never been through a hurricane.

I immediately panicked

Did we have enough food or would we have to eat the dogs?

Did we have enough water, or would we have to resort to cutting down trees to drink their sap?

Could I turn the pickup into an electrical generator so we could watch TV?

Most chillingly I pondered the biggest question: did we have enough beer?

I got online and looked to see what people were doing. Short answer: nothing. Most locals expect we’ll get some wind and rain.

 

Now, when I look on the graph above, and see that my house will be exposed to 50 mph wind (same as a car!) for up to five hours, I get a bit worried. My house isn’t a car, and frankly I wonder what kind of mileage it’ll get.

I also purchased some extra gasoline, putting my kidney up as a deposit. The gasoline will be good to escape Houston with, should a volcano show up at the same time as the hurricane (a hurricano) and, unless that’s coupled with an earthquake and a zombie attack (a hurrizomicano-quake), we should be just spiffy.