Part of today’s hurricane prep involves setting up Fort Kickass, where we’ll hole up if things get really bad. In the case of our house, it’s the closet under the stairs, an L-shaped, surprisingly roomy, carpeted affair.
In case you didn’t know where the name comes from, it’s an Archer reference:
And since this post is about taking shelter in a closet, you’ve probably already guessed what the music video for this post is:
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Here’s a selfie from our yard taken yesterday morning:
Yesterday morning.
Here’s another from the same place, taken this morning:
Here’s a wider shot of the yard, also taken this morning:
Click the photo to see it at full size.
And finally, here’s the Lowe’s that’s walking distance from our place at around 9:00 this morning. They closed soon after:
Click the photo to see it at full size.
Our status so far: We have plenty of provisions, and we’ve done the last of the work involved with the outside of the house. For the rest of today and tomorrow, it’s all about securing the house from the inside, which includes preparing our Harry Potter-style shelter in the safest room: the closet under the stairs.
As is the tradition with posts in this series, a thematically-appropriate music video:
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As of noon on Thursday, September 7th, I can already find three musical tributes to Hurricane Irma on Youtube.
The people at Under Pressure Power Washing LLC have a side gig as dancehall DJs, if their State of Emergency Song is any indication:
Charity Shine on Me is an earnest, folksy prayer written by Chris Eschete while stuck in a hotel in Shreveport:
And finally, Juan Pastel is playing it up for laughs with Ay Irma (La cancion del Huracan Irma), which he introduces as his only — and possibly last — song. Even with my (very) basic Spanish, I found it amusing.
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The latest edition (2014) of the FEMA Emergency Supply List recommends the following items for a basic emergency supply kit:
It also recommends these additional items, which you may or may not need, depending on your situation:
Since this post is about lists, and since I want to include a song on every Hurricane Irma Report, here’s Hall and Oates:
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Here’s the NOAA’s estimation of the “earliest reasonable arrival time”
of tropical-storm-force winds created by Hurricane Irma.
Click the graphic to see it at full size.
With Hurricane Irma expected to hit Florida on Saturday morning at the earliest, you may be wondering if you should stay put or evacuate. Or, as The Clash put it:
In the end, it mostly (but not entirely) comes down to a single question: Are you near the water?
I’ll leave it to Tampa Bay’s most senior TV meteorologist, Paul Dellegatto from local channel FOX 13, to explain:
I am getting a lot of questions asking about when we should evacuate.
You only evacuate to escape storm surge flooding from the Gulf and Bay. It is why we have evacuation zones near the Gulf and Bay.
You do not evacuate from the wind unless you live in a mobile home or you are facing a CAT 5 making landfall and you are expecting Andrew conditions right at the point of landfall.
Water is the killer. Wind is not. You run from water. You hide from wind.
We cannot evacuate the state based on the fact there may be strong winds. Given the options you would be better off riding out a storm in a well built home, out of an evacuation zone, then trying to drive up I-75 to a motel in Valdosta. You do not want to become part of the caravan driving up I-75. Trust me. It is a miserable option.
Hurricane Irma as seen from space.
Click the photo to see it at full size.
Anitra and I are always stocked for a hurricane, right down to the camping stove in case the electricity and gas go out. I’ve topped off our supplies, and picked up some extra sandbags. The one thing we don’t have is a generator, and hey, we may get one someday.
As of this morning, you’d never know that a major hurricane was coming if you didn’t have the benefit of radar. Here’s what the weather was like, as seen from our yard:
The view from our yard, around 10:00 a.m., Thursday, September 7, 2017.
For the benefit of friends and family who are wondering how we’re doing, as well as for the curious and those looking for information, I’ll post regularly here. Watch this space!
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Actually, I didn’t buy it, but who doesn’t want a sequined throw pillow with their initial on it?
The next time some know-nothing tells you that there’s no such thing as rape culture (such as this former pro hockey player who’s somehow teaching junior players about consent or this podcast with an author of books with some good insights on how boys are being left behind), point them to this latest but of counter-evidence: a judge in Canada delayed the already-downgraded sentence (from sexual assault and forcible confinement down to common assault) of a hockey player so that it wouldn’t affect his internship at Deloitte or his future.
Chance Macdonald is student at Queen’s University, considered to be one of the “Canadian Ivy League” and also my alma mater (I often refer to it a “Crazy Go Nuts University”, a term of endearment from some oddball, fun, colorful academic career there). In Canada, if you’re going after a 6-plus-figure career, Queen’s is one of the schools you go to, especially for their School of Business. Chance also played Junior A hockey (similar to Tier II hockey in the U.S.), which for many aspiring players is only two steps away from their ultimate goal: playing in the NHL. Once again, in Canada, hockey players in school enjoy the same stature as football players in U.S. schools.
Justice Allan Letourneau is a Queen’s grad, and he was also a junior hockey player in his youth. It appears that his abiding loyalty to Queen’s and hockey overtook his obligation to justice when sentencing Chance.
Chance Macdonald, 22, pleaded guilty to common assault in April after he was initially charged with sexual assault and forcible confinement following a 2015 party. Crown attorney Gerard Laarhuis said Macdonald’s victim accepted the lesser plea in part because she didn’t want to face a trial and the possibility of being disbelieved in court.
According to the Kingston Whig-Standard, Macdonald, then a player on Gananoque Islanders Junior C hockey team, wasn’t sentenced until last week because his lawyer argued a criminal record would ruin his four-month internship, which he needed to continue on as a Queen’s business student. Despite the Crown’s protests that the victim deserved closure, Justice Allan Letourneau sided with the defence and waited until last week to hand down Macdonald’s sentence of 88 days of intermittent jail on weekends and two years of probation.
…
He said the plea deal was “the right way to go in all respects.” He praised Macdonald on his excellence “in employment, in athletics, and in academics.” He noted, “I played extremely high-end hockey and I know the mob mentality that can exist in that atmosphere.” He told Macdonald he had significant confidence that “you will almost certainly never put yourself in this situation again,” describing the assault as a “fork in the road.”
On the flip side, most of Justice Letourneau’s warnings to Macdonald seemed to focus on how the business student may have ruined his future prospects.
“It all could have come crashing down on you,” he noted. Regarding the lesser assault plea, he said, “Good luck finding any meaningful employment with a sexual conviction on your record.”
If all this sounds familiar, it’s probably because you’re reminded of the case of Brock Turner, the weaselly judge who oversaw his case and who was more concerned about Turner’s future than that of the person he assaulted, and the horrible things Turner’s friends and family have said in his defense.
This is what we mean by rape culture: the fact that when a man, especially one from a well-off family, commits sexual assault on a woman, there’s a tendency — even in this modern day and age, when we should know better — to focus on how it will affect the man’s future than how it will affect the woman’s. And, in case I have to point it out, that is wrong.
To their credit, Deloitte Canada, where Chance had his internship, made this statement:
No statement has yet been issued by Queen’s University or its Smith School of Business. As an alumnus, I’m waiting…
Hey, Canadian businesspeople: You may want to check Chance’s LinkedIn page — Chance was very enterprising and has over 500 LinkedIn connections (a few people I know are connected via LinkedIn to him). You probably want dissolve that connection; if not for ethical reasons, at least for the pragmatic one of distancing yourself from this walking public relations nightmare. Here’s how you remove a LinkedIn connection.