I’m happy, but I understand my brother’s ambivalence…

I got some good news this morning. You might recall my brother and sister-in-law bugged out a few days ago from their lifelong home which happened, through no fault of its own, to be right smack dab in the frickin’ path of frickin’ Hurricane Irma.

My brother takes pride in his hurricane preps, and he’s been doing this a long time – judge for yourself how there came to be 40-year-old storage food in his utility shed – but he also had the wisdom to look at a danger and see that his preps would not save him from it. So Thursday morning in the wee hours, before the morning traffic started and having boarded up their and step-mother’s houses very securely, BB and SIL split the state.

Sounded like the thing to do at the time and I applauded the decision. But then Irma did what hurricanes often do just to keep us guessing, and hung a left. Last time I checked it wasn’t quite decided that it wouldn’t hang another hard right just for the express purpose of flattening Big Brother’s house. But as of the moment of last communication, things were looking good for the east coast – and really, really bad for the west coast.

I am sitting here (laying actually) a happy and slightly confused man.
It’s too soon to count my chickens, but it appears that I may have won the
hurricane game this time. As I wake up this morning, I find our home
officially “out of the cone”.

But just like with a classic zero sum game, the only way I win is if some
other poor schmuck loses. In this case the loser will be the entire west
coast of Florida. How can any moral person be happy about that? Like our
recent example of Houston, our west coast has flooding huge danger. For
the east coast the storm would have been mostly about the wind. On the
west coast they will have the same wind that we would have had, but they
will have massive flooding on top of that.

So if I win the hurricane game, my celebration will be muted.

Have a nice weekend Joel.

Yeah, you too, BB. For my part, though maybe it won’t buy me points toward nirvana, I can multitask. I can be sad for the west coast and happy for my brother at the same time.