Goodbye, Earl...

All up and down the eastern seaboard for the past several days, people have been fretting and sweating over the big bad hurricane named Earl.

Now, longtime readers of my journal know that I think that weather prognostication is a whopping heap of bullshit (I would say "pantload" but my friend Keri has forbidden me from using that term because it grosses her out. The mere mention of it will most likely cause her to never speak to me ever again, methinks. Anyway...) these "computer models" and "experts" always seem to get things whipped up into a frothing frenzy and people start literally losing their cotton-picking minds about a storm.

When Earl was way down past Puerto Rico and our weather dudes were sporting a massive woody over its "encroachment" and how it would soon be "bearing down" on the eastern coast, I told Doug that this was all going to fizzle out like a damp roman candle on a rainy fourth of July.

Days went past, and at about 10 miles an hour, long enough to give people the opportunity to start running around in circles screaming, Earl made his approach... heading for the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

Now, having been there, I know that it takes just one wave to take all the beach off the Atlantic Coast and plop it down onto Rte 12. We drove down there once after a particularly bad storm, and in the pitch dark as we were cruising to Salvo where our rental house was, I almost ran off the road because the road vanished, replaced by sand as far as the eye could see... and a snowplow ended up leading our way, plowing the sand the way 7 inches of snow would get plowed off of a New England road.

Watching the storm, a category 4 storm at the time, I actually was nervous for the little less than a mile wide in some places barrier island. The forecasters had it right, Earl wasn't going to go straight into land but would curve north east and come up to New England. A soft glancing blow "kissed" the Outer Banks and Earl made his way ... straight for us.

Earl petered out over the last 24 hours, and is not quite here yet... outer bands of drizzle mixed with dead calm and sunshine were all we got all day long after a night of panic and advice to take our boats out of the water! board up our windows! buy all the toilet paper!

This morning, I went to the market not because we needed supplies for six days of possible horror, but because I wanted Lemonade to mix with the vodka.

I also wanted a bunch of extra toilet paper, because everyone always buys all the eggs, milk and bread, but they do NOT buy TP to wipe their butts with after they've eaten their french toast. And you all know I am totally the person who is completely prepared. The place was insane. Like the end of the freaking world was coming.

And as of this writing at 7pm, the whole thing is, as usual, has been much ado. These things usually always turn out this way. And it is no wonder that no one left New Orleans before Katrina came ashore. No one believed the freaking hype.

I fully blame our media for their non-stop, incessant, frothing about these storms. I have asserted in the past that the media mega-global hyper-conglomerates are in full cooperation with Egg, Bread, and Milk suppliers to create periodic frenzy to force people to the markets to buy unneeded supplies.