Starry Night

I'm a hurricane tracker!!



Not officially, I don't have my own little farty plane that flies into the eye of the storm (which would be AWESOME), but I'm very interested in the weather.

It's true! I'm really nerdy about it. My mum thought I was a little weirdo, because most kids watched the Flintstones while they were eating their breakfast, getting ready for school.

I lay on the couch watching the Weather Channel till the last possible second I had to get dressed and walk the 5 minutes to school.



When you look at the Atlantic map on the National Hurricane Center Website, it's very artsy and swirly. Like the brushstrokes of a Van Gogh painting.





Chuck thinks I'm tempting fate and a hurricane will crash down on us and wipe us out by even looking at that website. When I give him a tropical storm update, he looks like he has the urge to go put on hip-waders.

Chuck's been through a few crazy hurricanes. I sometimes wonder why he bothered to stay in Coastal NC if he's so freaked out by them.

When Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, I had just come back to Canada from visiting Chuck. My grandpa was dying of lung cancer, so my brother Kurt and I trekked up to Northern Saskatchewan from Edmonton to hold vigil with my mum and the rest of my extended family.

I remember sitting in my grandma's living room, my grandpa there in a hospital-type bed...watching all the horrific events unfolding on the news because all we could do was wait and watch TV. It was like a movie, but it was real. Surreal. I don't mean at all to make light of the damage hurricanes can do, I'm just very interested in how they work.

In Edmonton, the worst things we had to worry about weather-wise were tornadoes and blizzards.

Tornadoes didn't happen very often in the city. The worst one on record was July 31, 1987...I didn't have to even look that date up because it was so infamous in Edmonton history. I was six, being the flower-girl in my uncle's out of town wedding at the time. My dad and my two older brothers were home though, and watched the whole thing from the outskirts of Edmonton. Luckily it didn't harm them.

Snowstorms were par for the course, they were bad every year. You kind of just got used to digging yourself out of your driveway so that you could get to work.

Did you know that a hurricane is unlikely to affect land west of Bermuda if it forms east of 35 degrees longitude?? No?? Well, there you are, you just learned something.

Danielle passed us by, but we may or may not get affected by the edges of Hurricane Earl. Wind? Rain? Nothing? Tomorrow we'll get a better picture of where it'll hit exactly.

Weather is fascinating. And meterologists on the news are always the weirdest people on the program. Perfect fit for me!!



*sigh* ...Just a bookseller with a dream. A crazy weather dream.