Three in a Row

A turbulent world.  

I woke up, briefly, around midnight to thunder and lightning. It was the welcome cold front that will, we are assuming, save us here in Louisiana from the approaching hurricanes. Yes.  Plural. The air was noticeably cooler than usual this morning when I went out in the dark to meet up with the WeMoRi group on the Lakefront. That's if you can call 75F cool, which I definitely can. Of course, there was also a north wind. With some lingering cloud cover, it remained dark for a long time this morning, and with various sections of street lights along Lakeshore Drive out, I was glad I'd added a second rear light to the bike before leaving. I hovered around in the darkness between Marconi and Shelter #2 for a while until I saw the cluster of blinky lights coming and rushed to make the turn back onto Marconi before being absorbed into the group, which this morning meant hanging onto the tail end and sprinting onto Robert E. Lee to close a gap before finally catching my breath halfway down Wisner.

An hour later, sitting at Starbucks with my cup of coffee, I checked Mike's Weather Page to see what the latest was on Irma. The morning forecast models had shifted it a bit to the east, but I knew they couldn't really be trusted quite yet. Still, it was comforting to know that the cold front had moved through as expected and the models were still in agreement about the rather dramatic turn to the north on Saturday. Hopefully by the time it gets up to the Orlando area where my brother lives it will have lost some intensity. By afternoon we had three named hurricanes all in a row. Irma's the big one, still at Category 5, and trailing behind it out in the Atlantic is Jose which is expected to turn north well before reaching us (we hope). Over in the western Gulf, Katia has just been upgraded to a hurricane and is heading into Mexico. Looks like we're going to luck out on all three of these this time around. We now have a FB page for the Cajun Airlift - a bunch of pilots that seem to be loosely connected with the Commemorative Air Force who have been airlifting supplies into the areas affected most by Hurricane Harvey and who are expecting to be needed again in Florida. It looks like the BVI, Puerto Rico and Cuba will be hit pretty hard first, and it looks quite bad for a lot of the Bahamas. The only good news is that the hurricane is moving fairly fast, currently at 16 mph.