TROPICAL TROUBLE COMING

Well, here we go!

We interrupt "Inspiration Thursday" for this update:

There is a Tropical Storm (potential Category 1 hurricane) heading our general direction.

This is one of the perils of living along the Gulf coast, you never know when these things will pop up, but at least we do have notice and can prepare.  This is the forecast path, you can see that even though it will "probably" make landfall to the Southwest of us, it's forecast to loop around and head right toward us.

We are good here in town, building is safe, windows are hurricane proof to 150+mph winds. We are also on the downtown electrical grid so the first priority in a widespread power failure is to get downtown back up and running. Our building also has a generator to supply temporary power so that’s good.  Lastly, no worries of flooding for us since we're several stories up and our cars are parked several floors up in the parking garage. 

As for the farm, not much we can do out there. The plants will get lots of water, hopefully not wash away, and of course the grass will grow like crazy making next weekend’s mowing insane I’m sure. Sigh. 

We have no livestock or animals to worry about so that's good and 2nd Family will keep an eye on things for us.  As they told us last night, rain they can handle, tornadoes, not so much. Tropical systems are notorious for spinning off small tornadoes. It has to do with the rotation of the storm, so we are hoping for none of that. If it remains a tropical storm, the winds are strong but not more than we sometimes get with a thunderstorm. If it gets up there close to or at a Cat 1 hurricane, then we will have 70+mph winds and that can definitely blow things around. 

See this chart? 

This is the rainfall estimate (as of yesterday). We are in the red area. That’s the 10”-15” estimate.  Some places are saying 20” of rain!  This will be spread over a few days but even still, that’s a dangerous amount of rainfall. Hoping that everything moves through quickly and drains away just as quickly.

The big unknown is that these storms are  notoriously unpredictable.  If it wobbles to the West, it's further away from us and maybe the heavy rain moves down the coast.  If it wobbles to the East it will be right on top of us and we'll get the rain AND worst winds AND the storm surge along the coast.

There he is. Tropical Storm Harvey. LOTS of rain and stormy weather.  Needless to say, barring some crazy unforeseen weather miscalculation that pushes it elsewhere, we will not be at the farm this weekend. We’ll just watch the weather unfold from the windows in our perch safely above downtown.

I"ll catch up with comments this weekend when we are housebound.  I have been busy with work (remember, insurance biz, this is our time, ha) so keep commenting, we appreciate it!

Stay tuned!