"And if it also comes on to blow and rain uncommon hard, we take battens, stout laths of wood, that fit against the coaming, the raised rim of the hatchway, and so pin the tarpaulin down drum tight." Patrick O'Brien, The Truelove.
Hurricane Isabel is heading in this direction.
I work with meteorologists (I'm the only mathematician in the group), and they are all abuzz. The weather models are converging on a track that shows hurricane Isabel coming up the Chesapeake Bay. It will begin to tear itself apart along the North Carolina Outer Banks and the southern part of Virginia before it reaches us, but it is still expected to be a Very Big Storm when it gets here, sometime after midnight on Thursday night.
I don't know why this is exciting, but it is. Unless Isabel changes direction, I'm 100% guaranteed to lose power at my house, and the novelty of being deprived of all forms of entertainment save reading by candlelight wears thin very quickly.
Nevertheless, waiting for a major storm is exciting. I know there is a possibility that my roof will blow off, or one of the oak trees in my front yard will fall over, or some other catastrophe will occur, and in fact, on the other side, there is nothing good that can possibly result. So it makes no sense at all to be excited about an approaching hurricane. And yet, I'm not alone in my excitement.
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