I have always loved the thrill of a tropical storm and/or hurricane!  It would have been nice to see the drunken chauvinistic French side of Edouard  today.  Especially since it happened to be my day off!  But alas, we had to settle for the milder mannered side. 

I remember Hurricane Alicia.  I was 3 and mostly remember sleeping on the living room floor with my grandparents and listening to the wind howl outside our 4 walls.  It’s funny that as a kid, it seemed like as long as I was inside my house, nothing at all could hurt me or my family.  I remember kerosene lanterns, and talking, and waking up the next day to a water filled yard and being carried across it to the road by my dad.  In my memory the yard had flooded several feet high.  But it’s like anything else I guess, everything seems so much bigger when you’re a kid.  It was probably not even knee high.  The interesting thing is that we stayed and weathered the storm and no one was injured and there wasn’t any damage to our home.  And we lived less than a mile from the Dickinson Bay. 

I think that this has really bred in me a distaste for all the paranoid hoopla about tropical storms and the like.  I get really frustrated with folks when they over react and over prepare for a little rain.  It’s just in my blood, i guess, to not start to worry unless we’re looking at the “Big Storm”.  Meaning Cat 4 or 5.  Here in Houston today, it was so bad that on every local channel, some weather reporter was out in the rain reporting on puddled parking lots and water filled ditches.  Seriously?  That isn’t newsworthy. 

 

But, thankfully the tropical rain storm made my entire day incredibly enjoyable.  Thank you weather gods.  Thank you.  And let’s see what you can do next time!