Wait­ing for Hur­ri­cane Isaac

By the time Mon­day morn­ing rolls around, Trop­i­cal Storm Isaac ought to be con­vert­ing into Hur­ri­cane Isaac. Liv­ing in Florida, you spend a fair amount of time won­der­ing if one of this bags full of wind and rain are going to plot a course through your liv­ing room. Hur­ri­cane Charley damn near did that back in 2004. It went right over my house in the dark of night, toss­ing a few trees around in my back yard. We were in the path of four hur­ri­canes that year. My next door neigh­bor lost every tree in his yard.

Then we really didn’t have to worry much over the years. Trop­i­cal Storm Fay came around a cou­ple of years later and soaked the place as it stalled over Cen­tral Florida, but I didn’t care. I was on assign­ment in Fort Worth and there wasn’t any dam­age when I got home. For some rea­son, though, I sus­pected early on that 2012 would be dif­fer­ent. We’re due for another hur­ri­cane to hit.

It looked like Hur­ri­cane Isaac would ful­fill my pre­dic­tion for a while, but it keeps edg­ing off to the west. Fine with me. We’ll have some blus­tery winds and rain, but that’s actu­ally a bit com­fort­ing. It drops the tem­per­a­ture down and gives me an excuse to stay inside and get some work done. I have a plethora of pho­tos to process from Star Wars Cel­e­bra­tion VI over the past few days.

There’s another way to look at Hur­ri­cane Isaac as an oppor­tu­nity, though. They say the best pho­tos hap­pen in the worst weather. Maybe that’s why news crews always send some poor dude out into the thick of the storm. We’re going to get some inter­est­ing cloud for­ma­tions. Every­thing is going to be wet. The waves are going to be hit­ting hard, even on the oppo­site coast. Hur­ri­cane Isaac may be in the cen­ter of the gulf, but every­thing it churns up rip­ples like a wave for hun­dreds of miles away. There’s no escape from some of its effects. I just have to decide if the best use of my time is to process pho­tos or go make some new ones. We’ll see how it goes.

As I tell every­one else when these things cross our path, “Have a happy storm!”