Ok so this is the sort of luck I have, right? I’ve been planning this trek for the last nine months – let’s recap. The hurt machine, then the walking, then the Kingdom of pain. The focus, the planning, the raising of money, which is the biggest thing of all…and some jumped up fucking wind with big swirly ideas thinks it can smash into Cuba and threaten everything I’ve worked so hard for…well I don’t bloody think so. Hurricane Matthew you can just fuck right off.
Sorry…as Meredith Grey would say, I’m feeling all dark and twisty as I sit, glued to the weather channel watching this big round white swirly thing chart a course towards the same place I’m headed in a few days time. I can’t begin to imagine how the people who live in hurricane alley feel every time one of these monsters rears its head, their nerves must be shredded. It’s bad enough sitting here with my morning coffee after a restless night dreaming about losing my new Tilley hat to the wrath of Matthew, or getting carried away on the wind like a fat Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz.
I hate the fact that I’ve got no control over what’s happening. So much so that I vaporised a whole bag of dinky deckers last night as I watched the latest weather reports from the safety of my armchair. People are being evacuated…best eat chocolate then. I mean for God’s sake what was that going to do to save the situation, apart from making me heavier and therefore less likely to blow away.
I feel like a mardy child, reacting because things aren’t going my way. I want to stamp my foot and thump the table and demand that the wind dies down. I have this horrible feeling that the whole trip is going to get canned just as we’re geared up to leave…when I come to think about it, it was a silly season to organise the trek in in the first place, given that it’s not unusual for hurricanes to come out to play in October.
I’m going to be like a cat on a hot tin roof for the next few days until we’re more certain about how and where Matthew is going to make landfall. Right now the folk who know about this stuff think it’ll smash into the eastern side of Cuba on Tuesday. We’re headed for the central bit of the island on Friday. I’m hoping that means that the bit we’re trekking in will be sort of out of scope for the worst of it. I don’t mind wind and rain, in fact that’s preferable to high heat any day in my book but I suspect the health and safety bods will be risk-assessing us to the moon and back, you know? I have this big fat knot of worry that they’ll make us postpone it.
Watch this space, and please keep everything you can possibly cross crossed…
Hi Dee–Our National Weather Service indicates that Matthew should be positioned just off the coast of northern Florida at 8 a.m. (EST) on Friday morning, about 350 miles away from Cuba. There’s another storm, Tropical Storm Nicole, which will be positioned just parallel to Matthew, and approaching Bermuda from the south at roughly the same time. So things will be rocky in that area of the Atlantic, but conditions in Cuba should be calm by Friday morning.
AW bless you Anne for letting me know – I’m torn between feeling sad for the lovely people in Haiti who needed this like a hole in the head, and being relieved that we’ll be able to go ahead. But I can live with rocky!
In the meantime, Messy Mimi says (ever resourceful by email, thanks Meems!)
‘As a person who’s lived through many a hurricane, I can tell you that the best tack to take is to say if they make us postpone it a few weeks, I will simply be that much more fit and ready because I will have more classes and more walks under my Citreenie shirt!
Thanks Mimi…we’re all on hurricane watch here, and waiting with bated breath to see how it’s all going to unfold.
For some reason my website seems to have decided anyone with a pulse today is actually a ‘bot’ (whatever one of those is) and won’t let any comments through…I’ll get the men with spanners on it!