Thursday, October 16, 2008

Once more into the breach dear friends.............

We had a couple of days after the Gustav clean up before we had to start preparation for hurricane Ike. Most of the stores had reopened and life was back as close to normal as it gets here. Even Bull’s Corner, our usual watering hole, was back in business.

Ike had clobbered Cuba, made the turn into the Gulf of Mexico and started North. It was looking for a while like it was going to be a repeat of Gustav but the path began to slant a bit more west and head toward Texas. As it got closer to shore, I got in on the landfall pool down at Bull’s. I picked Freeport and missed by about fifteen miles. It hit Galveston.

Hurricanes, in this hemisphere, swirl with a counter clockwise rotation. ( In the southern hemisphere they turn clockwise and are called Typhoons. I wonder if a storm has ever gone from one hemisphere to the other and if it did, what happened when it crossed the equator. Somebody look it up and let me know.)

We were on the east side of the circulation. That meant that if the storm was traveling 15 miles per hour and had winds circulating at one hundred and fifty, the winds that blew over you would be at a hundred and sixty five mph.

Fortunately we were far enough to the east that we did not get extremely high winds. Ike however, was a very wide storm. It did get pretty gusty and we had another couple of days of very heavy rainfall, but that was about it. Leaves not already blown from the neighbors oaks had another chance and took full advantage of it.
Our race car shop is under an open carport, enclosed on two sides by a six foot fence and on one side by the house. As you might imagine it was like an open waste basket and all the leaves got trapped in there and could not get out. They we more than ankle deep all over the floor, in back of every item on the shelves, in every open container, and even under that tarps and in side the race cars.

So we had a lot of clean up to do and the season was fast approaching. The first race was scheduled for early October. My target was the second race in November, but we still had to get Hugh ready.

So here we go……….. Again.

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