There is an edgy feel to the traffic today. Vehicles almost running stop signs, short bursts of speed for no apparent reason, cars cutting their turns short. Pre-storm behavior. I've seen it before. I am only surprised when there is not a line at the gas station or the bank ATM.
The grocery store parking lot is full, but people are buying party food: chips and dip and beer are going out the door in greater volume than gallons of water and canned mystery meat. It's hard to have conviction about a November hurricane.
Besides, Ida is such a wholesome name. If this storm 's name was Jezebel or Buster, I would worry that it would be a trickster. Mid-afternoon here, and it looks like Ida is continuing to weaken. It has already been downgraded from a hurricane to a tropical storm. Still, schools are closed today and tomorrow. Buck and I haven't decided yet whether to label and pull down all the plastic doors enclosing the pool. It will be a pain to go out in the rain and lug those doors into the little red storage building. But it will be a worse pain to go chasing after them in the middle of an early-morning landfall if we guess wrong.
Despite Ida's honest-sounding name, we have gassed up the car, gotten a little cash, bought a new battery for the generator, and picked up enough groceries to feed the multitudes. I didn't buy party food. I bought a chicken and a pork tenderloin to roast, ground beef for chili and meatloaf, canned salmon, eggs and veggies, that kind of stuff.
It's dark as night outside. The deer came out for a quick graze during a lull in the rain. They ran around in short, fast bursts that reminded me of the storm-neurotic drivers I saw earlier in the day.
Last night we sat on the dock at the Sugar Shack. The slow gray waves looked like a little weather was on the way. We watched as lights came on at homes across the water on the Alabama side of the bay. They were in various shades of yellow, white, lavender and blue and looked like a necklace strung with semi-precious stones.
