Technically, we started feeling the affects last night with light rain. I went to bed at 11pm (I'm never going to get my sleep schedule straight). My alarm went off at 3am, and I kept hitting snooze when I realized I still had electricity and WWL hadn't blow away.
I really woke up at 7am and lost electricity about 8:45. So far all I see is branches littering my yard. It's raining with gusty winds high in the treetops. Gustav's eye has made landfall, but as of 9:15 am, we haven't seen the backside of the storm yet.
Finished all my cleaning chores last night, except for washing dishes. But since I have a natural gas stove, I can boil water. No matter what happens with where I live--if I ever have to rebuild or if I actually get to remodel like I want to--I will always keep natural gas for cooking, if not heating too. Since they switched the house over from a kept propane tank to piped-in natural gas, we have never lost gas unlike the electricity.
Wow, a French Quarter resident who had left to visit Paris, France is calling from France. She's a good Catholic, lighting candles as St. Joan of Arc's thingy (I'm not Catholic I don't know what those things are called).
The weak spot in the back bedroom roof is not leaking, so the rain event hasn't been that hard, just steady. 9:30 am, they are reporting the winds have shifted from west to east. The backside of the storm has hit New Orleans, I think. I missed where that reporter was embedded at.
Gustav is now a category 2, but we could still have a flooding issue. Some places could pick up twenty inches of rainfall--not counting any storm surges. The Mississippi River rose five feet at one measuring station.
9:50am - another news conference, Mark Cooper from the Governor's Office, taped earlier. But no reports of having to rescue people during the night. Images on TV (according to the radio) are showing overtopping at the Industrial Canal. Mayor Naguin interview is the audio. No citizen arrests, depending on how things develop, people might be able to return by Thursday. Fires have broken out.
10am - Army Corps of Engineers news conference. Industrial Canal isn't overtopped, it's just wave action. Barges are loose in it. Boy, that was a stupid call. And they haven't made as many stupid calls this time.
1pm - Mom freaked out because a tree fell on the neighbors' house on the other side of them. She had a great view from her bedroom window. "I feel safer with you at our house." So I finished the dishes piled in the sink (if Gustav blows the house away it will be with clean dishes, damnit!), packed the paperwork I wanted to work on, and switched. At least, they got a generator running.
5pm - Uncle Scott got a TV and antennae working and we found out how bad Baton Rouge got hit. Gustav was worse than Betsy.
7pm - the much vaunted COOP system was finally updated. I had only been checking it all day long to hear the robot voice say "No weather-related disaster has been declared. Please report to work at your regularly scheduled time." Yeah, that matched the radio and TV reports we were able to get. New message said I didn't have to go to work Tuesday, so I took my headache home. I needed to do my back exercises and I needed some alone time.
I took 2 Tylenol PMs and a melatonin, stretched my back out, opened all my windows, drank water, and proceeded to lay in bed getting sleepy but no decrease in head pain. If I got up to close the window since rain was blowing in (three times during the night), my head spiked. I turned in the bed, my head spiked. I went to the bathroom around 11pm and my head still hurt.
Read Free!
The BookWorm
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