-My Brother Danimal, commenting on the 1999 season
My siblings and I have always had a fascination with bad weather. In our book, bad is good. Worse is better. And severe? That's down right awesome!!! So no small wonder that one of our favorite natural disasters is the mighty hurricane!!
Living in the state of Florida has it advantages and disadvantages. It is hot, sticky, vile and miserable for most of the year, but we also are geographically advantaged!! We are the penile extension of the United States, which thrusts us directly into the warm, churning waters of the Atlantic ocean and directly into the path of a majority of the storms that develop!
The 1999 season produced hair-raisers such as Floyd, an impressive, powerful storm that shut schools down across Florida. Including the University of Florida, which was amazing because I thought it would literally be a cold day in hell when that school gave us a day off for any reason besides impending nuclear holocaust. Orlando and my brother's family were evacuated, the roads were a crowded mess, the whole state had their panties in a swirl with memories of impressive beasts like Hugo in their heads. What FUN!!
But as we all know, Floyd turned out to be a disappointment. It veered away from the Florida coast and instead headed out to where every hurricane that has ever made landfall eventually hits: the Carolinas. If a hurricane is going to hit land, you can just about bet your life that it's going to eventually, somehow, even if it has to start in the Gulf of Mexico, cross the mainland, go out to the Atlantic and restrengthen, and then turn around and come BACK (hey, it's happened), it will undoubtedly hit somewhere in the Carolinas.
Nature had a chance to redeem herself with Gert. Oh well.
After that point the Weather Channel made it a point to try and name every single cloud mass that formed anywhere near us, so that they could say we had a busy season. Sigh. Freakin lazy hurricanes!!
So again I tempt fate and say
BRING IT ON, YEAR 2000!!
Yes! It's the new millenium!! Along with which we were promised anarchy and pandemonium!! The Y2K bug was apparently fixed, and that Nostradamus guy had his mental calender off a bit (not the only thing mental that was off a bit, mind you). So something exciting has to happen this year. How about a hurricane?
According to rabid scientists that stare into the sun for hours at a time, we are polluting the earth's atmosphere so much that we can expect a gradual warming trend. The sun's radiation gets trapped beneath our atmosphere full of funk, and starts making the earth into a sauna. Woo-hoo!! What's that mean for us mere Earthlings? Warmer winters!! Quicker tans! And BIGGER STORMS!!!! Those scientist-types claim that the storms will get stronger and more frequent, since there will be so much warmth and moisture in the air.
A hurricane named Chris for the year 2000? Well, it's probably as close as those bozos will ever get to "Chrissy", so I will take what I can get!! Woo-hoooo!!
07.11.00. Well, this hurricane season has left me pretty underwhelmed. It's July, and we had a few disturbances, but nothing was even named!! Sigh, I guess the only 'canes for me are the ones in my dreams.
08.05.00. FINALLY!! Our first named storm of the 2000 season! Alberto swarmed to life off the coast of Africa and is heading our way, naturally. Meteorologists seem to think we'll know it's destination by next weekend, and I seem to think it will go off and hit the Carolinas, like usual. Those weather guys always have good excuses when they are wrong, and this time they blame the inactive 'cane season on cooler Atlantic waters (the water needs to be 82 degrees F for one to form) and a weak La Nina. New predictions give us 11 named storms, 7 hurricanes, and 3 great big fantastic monster hurricanes. The season should get real around August 20th and stay active about three months. We'll see. Mother still thinks it's because the Earth is tilting on it's axis. Me, I think I live under a bubble.
