Late Night with Hurricane Frances

Our position: 27.88 N, 82.28 W
Frances' position (as of 11 p.m. EDT): 27.1 N, 79.7 W
Tornado warning in effect for the county to our east

The western portion of the eyewall has come ashore on the east coast. We're starting to see video out of the West Palm Beach area and other east coast outposts, showing the sideways rain and palm trees whipping to and fro.

About 7 p.m., with a light drizzle falling outside our windows, we thought it might be a good idea to take the kids to the neighborhood Chick-Fil-A and let them burn off some energy in the indoor play area before putting them to bed. We flipped the radio to the local news mouthpiece, which has been doing wall-to-wall hurricane coverage since late last night. The guy on the radio was in full War of the Worlds mode, telling of death and destruction and death and stuff, headed right for us.

One side of my brain said, "Settle down, Beavis." The other side of my brain said, "Let's just go through the drive-through and go home."

The other side won. The activity level in eastern Hillsborough County looked only slightly less than normal for a Saturday evening, but with the rapidly greening sky and the occasional mild gust of wind, it just seemed a little eerie. We took our Chick-Fil-A home and put the kids to bed.

Now we're debating whether one of us should stay up overnight and listen for tornadoes. We have no tornado sirens in Florida; the sound of the freight train likely wouldn't wake us up before windows started breaking.

We're told the serious bad weather should begin sometime around 8 a.m. Sunday. It's raining pretty hard now, but the winds are relatively calm. We'll be sleeping with one ear open.

An evening with Frances

Our position: 27.88 N, 82.28 W
Frances' position (as of 5 p.m. EDT): 26.9 N, 79.3 W
Tropical Storm Warning issued for our county

The Wife went out at 5 p.m. to get dog food. She called about half an hour later: "I've been injured!" she declared. "A flying tree branch just grazed my arm!"

We're still trying to have a little bit of fun with this, but it appears the fun is going to be subsiding soon. A couple of rain bands, each larger and louder than the previous, have blown through. It still hasn't been anything more severe than the average afternoon Florida thunderstorm, but the fact that they're increasing in intensity each time through doesn't bode well.

The Wife observed in her trip to the grocery store -- a place that was still wildly crowded as afternoon became evening -- that some stuff had already started to blow down. "If we get hours of 50 mph winds," says the woman who's been pooh-poohing this whole thing vehemently since the news stations began playing their "You're All Going to Die" music, "this could be a real mess."

It certainly could be. The longer the thing sits out there on the fringe of the Edge, the stronger it's going to get.

Lessons learned

Our location: 27.88 N, 82.28 W
Frances' location (as of 2 p.m. EDT): 26.9 N, 79.0 W.

I'm feeling bad for these TV guys, who are having to say the same things repeatedly again. "It's an incredibly slow moving storm ... " "It's an incredibly slow-moving storm" ... " "It's an incredibly slow moving storm" ... which means there's nothing new to report.

Some lessons were learned from three weeks ago, however:

--More than 2.5 million people have been ordered to evacuate. However, they're being told to stay close to home, preferably in a higher-level area of their home county. Traffic has been bad, but it hasn't yet been the nightmare that it could have been with an evacuation of that magnitude.
--The TV folks are being careful to remind people to not focus on the path, but on the wider cone of the margin of error. This lesson is sticking tight, given that we all focused on Charley's forecast path right up until the second it changed.

The thing that we're working against now is hurricane fatigue. Being able to plan this far out for a disaster means that people are now sitting in shelters with nothing happening. "Shelters are for emergencies," one woman told The Miami Herald as she left a shelter, against the advice of local authorities. People are going to be too drained from the pre-math to deal with the aftermath, if there is an aftermath.

Hi, Fran

Our position: 27.88 N, 82.28 W
Frances' position (as of 11 a.m. EDT): 26.9 N, 78.8 W.
Tropical storm watch in effect for our county

The rain just started. Buckets and buckets of rain. It's a little windy, too. But I'm seeing rain like I've never seen.

This is what they call a "feeder band." It's spinning off to the north and west of Frances, which is currently "drifting" in the Atlantic. They can't even assign a miles-per-hour speed to the thing, because it's moving so slow.

And in the time it took me to type this, it stopped raining. And now the sun is out.

However, that was only a preview, they say.

The pre-math, continued

Our location: 27.88 N, 82.28 W
Frances' location (as of 8 a.m. EDT Saturday): 26.7 N, 78.4 W

The storm isn't moving much, which I'm sure is causing great frustration and consternation among refugees who are taking shelter in hotels, schools and various other places. The entire state (except for a few Panhandle counties and the Jacksonville area) is basically at a standstill, looking east and waiting for the ... well, for whatever it is that's going to hit us.

The problem with the entire state being at a standstill is that it greatly restricts our ability to do anything. Traffic is awful, even over here on the Western Edge where nothing is happening, because of the stream of evacuees headed this way. The grocery stores are already out of everything again, and the gas stations have been tapped out. We almost feel somewhat ostracized because we're not participating in the widespread panic.

But it's hard for us to generate panic when we're not quite sure about what we should be panicking.

The Sarasota Herald Tribune's web site put it best: "Whatever you've heard about Hurricane Frances' upcoming assault on southwest Florida, don't bet on it." This exercise is further proof that despite all the technological advances and the ability to bring up-to-the-second updates every other second, you're still dealing with a natural phenomenon, and natural phenomenons tend to defy man's best efforts to take control of them.

Meanwhile, here on the west side, it's beautiful. The kids are in the pool again. We're calmly doing things that need to be done while we still have electricity, just in case. It would suck to have this pile of laundry here tomorrow if the power was out.