A Thought an Hour: Musings on an Inland Hurricane

So for the next 24 hours I will give my hourly thoughts (minus when I am sleeping) on Hurricane Irene as it develops here in the Triangle.

Facebook postings around 7:55am:
-Pray for the East coast!
-Ripples of cloud cover creep in from the wrong direction. It begins...
-BTW, we are only in a low-moderate risk zone, but Irene looks to do some serious damage all up the east coast.

Facebook posting at 1:24pm:
So now there is a constant breeze in one direction, only, and this in a city where a summer breeze is quite scarce.

Facebook posting at 4:23pm:
And now you can actually watch as bands of clouds at the furthermost parts of the storm move over.

430pm: It is true that generally North Carolinians--including the weathermen--overreact to inclement weather and make quite a hoopla over nothing. However, in response to the die-hards who are not taking this seriously (from the guy still walking his dog on a quickly disappearing Wilmington Beach to the locals who refuse to bring in their lightweight outdoor objects), I can't help but feeling this time that the storm may actually be so obvious that even meteorologists couldn't help but notice it.

530pm: The tops of the very tall trees surrounding our home sway and I begin to have a thought for our roof and the high winds that are coming. To distract, we have an Irene party: homemade pizza and a terrible kids movie about a girl who turns her brother into a bug. We are inside for good, now.

630pm: From minute to minute I look out the window to see all the leaves dancing and then complete, eery still. On our second kids' movie of the night. I am curled up reading a craft magazine that a friend got me for my birthday, still licking my pepperoni lips.

730pm: Catching the forecast online every hour. Looking like we might end up just out of reach here in Durham. Durham is the weather hole of the this-side-of-the-Mississippi.

830pm: At 820, rain started cascading, suddenly. Then it stopped, then started, then stopped, then began again. Now it is coming down steady, but whipping around a bit. It looks to be a night full of rain and wind.

930pm: Kevin has returned home from work. He has rammed a pencil into his broken, car window to keep it up against the rain. Speaking of rain, it has stopped and its only crickets chirruping and frogs singing I hear out in the dark. Honestly, the radar looks like we are out of the storm area at least for the next few hours, and with the center moving eastward, who knows...

1030pm: I realize that although it might prove to be a boring and disappointing hurricane for us inland Carolinians, the eastward turning, diminishing Irene is much better for the coastals who will be spared lives, homes, and livelihoods. Off to bed. Hope to check in tomorrow sometime after 830am.

9am: Official landfall almost exactly where they predicted it, on the Outer Banks. If you watch the radar, you can see that Durham and parts of Raleigh are in this invisible ballooon where all the storms just seem to be twisting toward us and then dissipate. So I don't know exactly what happened while I was asleep, but there seems to be little going on now, except for some wet birds chirping in the dismal grey.

10am: So its not exactly too stormy here, but I have been a bit blase. When I remove the sounds of the dishwasher and the kids whining, there is that constant hum of a good breeze continuing. And even when the leaves on the oak are not whipping up their undersides at me, the loblollies are swaying, swaying, swaying. Plus, our power did go out this morning, but only for like 30 seconds. So, here in Durham, like a normal stormy day, and so the reports are from Dan and Lindsay as well, down in Fuquay.

11am: The Triangle appears to be out of the woods. I will stop doing my updates now, and concentrate my energy instead on making a gift for on a kids' birthday and the horribly hot and humid day that is coming tomorrow.

2pm: Alright. One more thing. As the storm conintues to move through North Carolina, I have come up with an analogy for our position in Durham. Imagine a little eddy alongside a rushing river. Most the time the eddy is sitting still, perhaps rippling in the breeze, sustaining a small amount of quiet life. But sometimes, for whatever reason, the river sloshes one way as a fish swims by, or the wind whips it up to a higher level... whatever. The river rushes into the eddy, it swirls around, and then as it empties back out it calms back down, settles. That is how it has been all day. It is fairly windy outside and grey and you can watch as clouds go hurrying by overhead. But we have had the most sudden, random things fly off the outermost reaches of the hurricane: like this amazing gust of wind that hit the front of the house like a boulder, whipped all the trees in the yard into a frenzy of inside-out limbs, and then stopped three seconds later. Our power has also flicked on and off a couple times; one time it just faded in and out and in and out for a few minutes and then... all was calm. So mostly quiet on the western front.