Hurricane Ike—bring it on!

I don’t usually blog about anything personal, but it’s high time I put Hurricane Ike into the annals of this blog. We got the day off early today, we don’t have to go tomorrow, and Ike’s supposed to drop bombs Friday night/Saturday morning.

A lot of people get bent out of shape over hurricanes, but not me and my roommates. We’re riding it out here in Houston, for all of my friends who are reading this. We’re expecting a lot of rain, some flooding—the usual. When Not Hurricane Allison came in a few years ago, 3- to 4-feet of rain got dropped all up on our street and almost to the doorways. I know this because I had a solid convo with our new neighbor Brandon who’s a cool dude whose son goes to LSU who lived in the house next door during the storm. He’s already bolted, but I’m not that type of person.

Being from Houston, I’m used to Hurricane scares. We get them every year, at least two or three times a year. For all of you non-Houstonians, we have digital signs over our freeways that are controlled by our city Metro. For the past two months, if there’s not a wreck, they read: “Storm is forming. Fill up your tanks.” Whether or not there’s a storm forming, or even if it’s remotely headed this way, we’re constantly prepared to deal with a hurricane.

Preparedness be gone. This Ike thing is the real deal. Unless something drastic happens, we’re gonna get it. When I went to work this morning, Ike was slated to drop rain all over somewhere between Corpus and Houston. But now? BAM. Directly over Houston. In fact, so direct, go look at a map and it’s going to land to the east of Houston and to the west of Galveston. And for people like you Ben Cochran who’s in North Carolina, that’s not a big distance.

So here we go! Let’s hope this thing doesn’t get too out of control. But I will make one guarantee: If this hurricane is legit, you can guarantee my brother and I will be in swimsuits screwing around outside. But only in the daylight. Because as the joke goes: It’s not how fast the wind is blowing, but what it’s blowing.