Training Day 2

Some of my readers might be wondering about the second day of training. And as much as I would love to tell everyone, I learned about the "cone of silence", so now I can not post about it. After all, how do I know you are NOT involved in a contract bid to sell training material to the County?

Speaking of cones, check this one out.

Thats right, a perfect circle. This storm is going to give Florida the reach-around. It missed the state, so it is turning around in an attempt to try again.

One of the storms did the same crap last year, and I think it ended up hitting the state. Wait a minute, they ALL hit Florida last year! You would think that this would have lit a fire under someone in charge of FEMA's ass, but since hurricanes do not wear turbans apparently they were not on the "do not admit into the USA" list that Customs And Border Patrol has in their computer, they were not questioned at the port of entry. All the storms also had valid US Visas, and could not be fingerprinted. So they sliped in under the radar. But not under the doppler radar. Someone get FEMA a doppler radar!!

Anyway, lets just hope that this one does not pull across Florida, intensify, and hit the gulf coast of Mississippi again. That would be absoutly horrible. Even if the thing hits the gulf coast region as nothing more than a very wet depression it would be bad news for a city already flooded like Wal-Mart on $15 DVD player day.

And here is the kicker, with a perfect circle cone of death, the storm has the same odds of being in North Carolina as South Florida in 5 days. And I am no Rick Sanchez of CNN here, but when storms do the loop-de-loop they have to be moving slow. So in 5 days, the thing could be stalled just offshore, dumping rain on someone - probably Florida. Everyone in the cone, or near to the edges, need to pay attention to this thing.

And if by now you do NOT have a disaster kit, you are retarded. Go build one. And not just us people living in hurricane states - EVERYONE needs a disaster kit. No matter where you live, there are earthquakes and tornados and floods and blizards and wild bears and crazy people with guns and falling chunks of space rocks and volcanos and who knows what else. Build a disaster kit, store it somewhere, check it regularly, and cycle the stuff in it with new stuff every so often. It is even a good idea to have drills, if you live someplace where disasters can creep up with no warning.

If you live in an area at risk of tornados, you SHOULD have a SAME compatible weather radio. These radios are not expensive, so get one OK! Everyone should have one. Here is how they work. You program your radio with your SAME code and set it to the proper frequency. Your radio will constantly listen to NOAA weather broadcasts, and if it detects that ANY kind of watch or warning is issued for your area it will turn itself on and you will hear the alert. When the alert is over, it will turn back off.

So lets say you are sleeping and you hear rain outside. No big deal - so you go back to sleep. Then a tornado touches down. How do you know about it? Well, you don't - unless you have a SAME radio. So get one. The best ones run on two power sources, electricity and batteries. The ass it saves could be yours.

But what can I do about all this? Not a darn thing. I want to use my boat on Saturday! I am working full time again - and what the hell is the point in that if I use the boat LESS than I did when I only held a part time job? So I will keep one lazy eye on the storm, but I am not going to worry about it. If it hits it hits. No point in stressing out here. The NHC wind speed forecast model only has the thing as a minimum category 1 storm in the next 48 hours. And what about after that? The model center line (median data average) is a straight line (no chance in wind speed from 48 to 72 hours), but the orange area (30% probability on either side of the median line) show a slight decrease. So this is is not very likely to be anything major, at least not in the next three days.

But right now there is no way to tell where the thing will go. The cone is a perfect circle. You can only make an accurate guess when the cone is cone shaped. I guess I will hold off on replacing the tree I lost in the last storm (I want to get a gumbo-limbo tree).