08 July 2005 16:02
THE HURRICANE CHRONICLESThursday 1552
I'm sitting in the salter's front living room, listening to "garbage: i'm only happy when it rains" and watching the rain pelt against their south window. or through it, depending what part of the window you're talking about. the top part of the window is atually open, it is a twelve inch high window that runs the entire horizontal length of the other swinging windows (about eight feet wide). it's canted open (top in) so that the drips running down the inside wall from the leaking roof fall on the outside of hte window and run back out. there's a drip beside me that's created a four inch wet spot on the sofa in the three minutes since jesse left, he got tired of holding a large water glass in his lap to catch the drips.
dennis hasn't been much of a trip so far. the last news we saw about an hour ago showed the eye off the coast to the north west, but at the time there was a whopping light drizzle with surging wind gusts to ten mph. now there's solid rain and gusts probably to 30 mph. we might be getting somewhere now. we haven't been real interested in starting a hurricane party until the hurricane actually shows up. i drove down here around one pm, the roads were relatively (for a thursday afternoon) very empty, with nothing but the standard one inch sheeting of water that runs down them whenever a cloud sneezes. the local infrastructure theory goes; people shouldn't be driving in a rain storm. therefore nobody will be using the streets. good, we'll skip sewer drains and just use the streets.
ahh, and update, where they use the same radar clip for the intro that they've been using for the whole day, showing dennis due south of hispanola. then they cut to a wx channel clip, which is of course concerned with forecast for the US than for Jamaica. ah, now we're onto prime minister PJ Patterson who is encouraging people to remain indoors during the hurricane. suuuuure. and talking about the shelters in his very very slow and infuriating way of speech. like he's got allll the time in the world to say what he's goign to say and thinks through each word oh so carefully before he speaks. it took him about 15 seconds to say the following:
the central ... facilitiessss .. that are ... required. toooo .. help uss . provide ... shelterrrr ... for those . whoo .. are innnn .. need.
I can say it five, even adding pauses to make it sound like i was making it up on the spot.
1637
I've moved into the kitchen, sans power cord, we'll see how long my battery lasts. it claims 3:52, but based on previous experience i'd say 35 minutes tops. we came here to connect to jesse's ipod speakers and play a song for him and the girls. namely, "the devil went down to jamaica", a spoof of the charlie daniel's song. they liked it--good, that means i'm now an accepted member of the community, right?
the rain and wind have slacked off, now we've got a steady medium rain.
1813
we just finished a large long dicscussion on the eddie-kay-shun systems of canadia, the states, and jamaica respectively. it had nothing to do with the hurricane. the hurricane had nothing to do with us. it breezed once. it drizzled the whole time. some of us are starting to go stir crazy. doc's getting ready to make supper, something i'm not sure i will partake of, he's goign to great efforts to empty the refridgerator. this will make the rice a very interesting mix of...various foods. i'm not getting cabin fever, but then i've only been here since one.
last night i battoned down the hatches at work, stuck all light stuff in the chain-link cage, all water-sensitive stuff in the shop, locked the door and drove off. the hangar/office sits all of 500 yards from the shore, so we'll see if anything's washed away when i get back. last year with ivan, there was three feet of sand on the causeway. they've got that road closed right now (so i heard on the US news.. why they would know is another question--i guess it makes interesting news). i didn't actually drive down there to check, but i wonder whether security's still hanging around the airport. sounds like a good time to loot. wait, the only stuff to loot is my own. if my radio's gone when i get back, i'm not going to be very happy. but i'm publiclly anti-materialistic, so i can't confess to that. ignore what i said before.
we also had discussions on sports, art, and the überman system. this is the system where you survive life on three hours of sleep a day yet feel much more energetic and everything. you stay awake for three and a half hours, sleep for half an hour, then get back up. you go through this cycle six times each twenty-four hour day. you have to be religious about the sleep, when your three and a half hours are up, you should be in bed NOW. "apparently" your body gets used to this (after a troublesome week and a half to two week break-in period), and you fall instantly into REM sleep, since you don't have a whole lot of liesure time to commit to the normal extended deep cycle of REM. also, you apparently start to develop certain nutrient deficencies that your body would produce naturally during the normal sleep cycle. instead you start to crave certain foods to "make up for it". sounds quite quackish to me, but still somethign i intend to look up on the internet when i get back to a connection.
jesse's the one that has the urge to try it. he's also wanting to learn dvorak, which is a sentiment i share much more affinity with than the überman concept. unfortunately, you would not be looking at the quantity of written material above if i was diligently sticking to learning it. or would that be fortunately? maybe i'll go practice some.
Friday 0256
The rain is sheeting against the windows, the wind is howling, and lightening is striking with some frequency within a mile of here. kari retired long ago (during the nine o'clock hour), doc retired in the ten o'clock hour, i tried to leave at midnight but had trouble getting the electronic gate open, and looking at the river running down the street decided to take it as a sign. tessa retired then, and i moved back into the kitchen. jesse is making some broccoli and pasta mix from a bag, but he's already been through two of his half hour uberman naps. that thunder was less than a second away... things might finally be warming up!
actually they're not. while this is indeed the strongest cell we've had in the past three hours, it will soon fade. denny should be well along the north coast by now, and were just catching the bands trailing from the spiral. every twenty minutes or so the wind and rain will pick up for five minutes, then die back down again. this particular cell though, has been pounding us for at least fifteen minutes...jesse and i have to talk loudly to communicate. i'm currently on page 380 of harry potter book number three--we hadn'te been communicating much until i saw him casting about for something to eat and recommended the noodles (i started this evening, and got serious after midnight around page 100).
for the first time in my tenure in jamaica, i could go for a hot cup of cocoa. the wind and rain have been great reading companions. honestly, this storm has not been too bad. wind-wise at least, flooding is the critical issue. it's been constantly raining/misting for 23 hours now. nothing compared to the pacific northwest, or to an english winter, but jamaica doesn't take too much time to get saturated.
0426
things have been quiet for a bit now, though we had some good thunder earlier. the roosters also started crowing half an hour ago when the rain quieted down for a bit. i just finished the potter book, and slogged my way through a little dvorak practice. but this laptop is growing very warm and my fingertips are still sore from the thirty minutes of random guitar practice i had this evening, so i'll knock off and get a little sleep in case i actually have to fly today. i move to jesse and ryan's room (ryan is up north with the ormsby's). both beds are pushed away from the window due to spray and drips. as i toss a sheet over the sofa cushions i layed on ryan's wet mattress, i can hear the cacophony of half a dozen drips hitting soaked towels or hollow buckets on the floor with a random pattern.
1013
a whopping 3.5 hours of sleep later, i got up. i had slept quite soundly, despite both roosters and hurricanes vying for my attention. the latter died while i was asleep, the former didn't (much to the salter's continuing dismay, i'm sure. but they've survived the roosters crowing away beneath their windows for ten months now, i think then can stand three more weeks). jesse and tessa were both up in the kitchen when i staggered out at 0730. jesse had survived another power nap and was on his fourth cycle. a little bit later doc made his appearance as i sat there in the kitchen trying to sit upright. i was running along on only about five cylinders. (...out of eight).
coming up the hill, i was dodging traffic in a light rain with rivers still pouring down the streets, trying take pictures between the windshield wipers, and of course roland chose this minute to call from his dry corner of mexico. the part of the city that i saw wasn't in too bad of shape, mostly minor flooding. saw pics on the news last night of portland area residents running around the streets in knee deep water. definately not that bad up here (though downtown kingston tends to flood knee-deep after an inch of rain, and we definately have gotten more than an inch). coming up the ridge there was noticbly more wind damage as the elevation gain brings greater exposure. no damage to anything other than the shrubbery, i spent an hour mopping puddles out of roland's kitchen and my bedroom. now it's time for some more sleep.
my wind chimes survived. what more can a person ask for?
1540
now i'm at work, after wading through a foot of water in the hangar to reach the office. besides the water being nine inches deeper than i'm used to nothing else has changed. roland and i are working on coming up with a name for our lake. and maybe a flatbottomed swamp boat to get around in.
Appendix I
-wikipedia.org --on the Uberman cycle.
-a google search works as well.
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