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Hurricane Harvey is on his way, Lets see Loaded up on food and grabbing more, Propane Tank for the Generator is Toped off, Water filtration system is good and also have extra bottled water if needed, Vehicles are all toped off, etc...
Now if only I an not cut off with flooding and all this prep was overkill I will be happy, I hated the Ike aftermath hopefully this one will be less severe.
Sorry I can not send more money to help with the costs Erin, Mother Nature has already gotten warmed up wth Hurricane Season, if i end up unscathed I will try to send some next week. Here is Hoping!
Everyone else in the gulf Coast hang in there.
Comments
Do hope all are spare
Mad and all people, who live in the pathway of Hurricane Harvey are spared from the worse that it can do. Will be thinking and hoping, no one is killed by Harvey's passage. Best of luck, Mad.
therisa
Thank you
Thank you. I'm sure we'll be fine. Me and mine, at least.
-- Daphne Xu
Flooding is our main concern
Thanks for the well wishes.
We should be fine but you never know, as they say hope for the best and plan for the worst.
"Cortana is watching you!"
Harvey
... the invisible six-foot-high white rabbit.
-- Daphne Xu
Puka-Harvi the Destroyer
Oddly, I was just writing about this terrible vengeful rabbit yesterday.
A visiting merman prince from an undersea kingdom in the Indian Ocean is
showing my story's mermaid heroine around his big fancy sailboat:
The Eye of Dawn was a two masted schooner. Standing alongside of its rear mast was about the creepiest statue I've ever seen.
I stopped. “What the heck is that?!!?”
Looming four meters tall, it was a massive bloodshot eyeball sitting on top of a strangely tapered leg and a more or less human foot- like an ice cream cone designed by Salvador Dali. The eyeball seemed very angry, and had an X shaped array of four bent lightning bolt-things shooting out from its edges.
“That's our god, Ihop.”
“What's he the god of?”
“What do you mean 'the god of'?” asked Agogo, a bit irritably, “He's the god! The one and only, the first and final God of Everything! He creates the Universe, and from his Unblinking Self all that's good in the world flows.”
“Oh. So you're like.. what do you call it? Monotheists?”
“Well of course we are! We're not pagans; Like those silly human Hindus up on the subcontinent; with a hundred different gods for every little thing! That's the kind of primitive theology you'd expect from hunter-gatherer tribes, barely more evolved than our land ape ancestors, not a so-called great civilizat-”
He stopped in mid-syllable, his hazel brown cheeks turning slightly red---as it occurred to him that I belonged to the Church of Atlantis, which had a whole clown car's worth of gods and goddesses---and groaned “Oh! I am so so sorry! I can be such a small-minded jerk sometimes!”
“But it's such a cute little mind,” I squeaked in a June Foray voice, and then in my own voice: “Don't worry about it, I'm not really that devout.”
“That's very generous of you,” he said, and as we began squirming forward again suggested, “Maybe it would be better if we didn't talk about religion.”
“Yeah, that's probably a good idea...”
But when we got to the forward mast---which was smack up against the back wall of the wheelhouse---there was another statue. A bunny rabbit with big soft eyes who was standing upright and about as tall as a human toddler who looked like Thumper from Bambi. He had one paw held up like one of those Japanese good-luck cats they sell at the swap meet.
“Oh how adorable!” I gushed, “Who's this little fella?”
Agogo shuddered. “That's Puka-Harvi the Destroyer. From him comes all the suffering in the world! All the hate and pain and sorrow; diseases, disasters and death!”
Okay, now I was confused. Not just because their baby bunny god looked so innocent, but...
“I thought you just said you only had one god.”
“We do. There is only Ihop. But unfortunately Ihop has a dissociative disorder-”
“A split personality?”
“Exactly! And when he becomes Puka-Harvi terrible things happen.”
“So why do you have a statue of him if he's so evil?”
“Because he's necessary.”
“Okay... And how is having both Ihop and him not polytheism?”
“Because he's the same god! He just forgets, and shape-shifts. There's those three human religions- Judaism, Christianity, Islam,” he ticked them off on three fingers. “Those are all monotheistic, aren't they? One god?”
“That does seem to be one of their bragging points.”
“Then who's the Devil? They say, 'Well he's only an angel...'; But he has the power of a god, almost as powerful as their big god himself, stealing off with the souls of nearly every human on Earth; while all any other angels seem able to do is come down and help young single mothers with cheap pop psychology advice,” he said, I guess referring to some film or TV show he'd seen. “So it's the same thing. Except Puka-Harvi the Destroyer is much more powerful than their 'Satan' because he is God; and he completely obliterates the whole universe!”
“When is this supposed to happen?”
“It's happening right now.”
I looked around. The sun was shining. A bank of big fluffy white clouds sat contentedly on the horizon. A trio of seagulls went flapping lazily past. “Seems like he's getting off to a slow start...”
“No, not slow at all. Nine billion, eight hundred and seventy-six million, five hundred forty-three thousand, two hundred and ten times a second Ihop creates the universe; then turns into Puka-Harvi who destroys it; then turns back into Ihop and brings it all back---you, me, this ship, all the planets and stars and galaxies---only slightly different. It all happens faster than anyone can see, in the gaps between instants. But that's the reason things can move, and how what we call 'time' can even exist...”
I looked at my hand, not really expecting to see it flickering but checking anyway. I said, “Wow, that's quite a battle they're fighting!”
“It is. But Ihop will triumph in the end, because each time he creates the universe he's able to move it a tiny bit closer to perfection. And once the it reaches its perfect state it will be fixed, immutable, and Puka-Harvi won't be able to destroy it ever again.”
“But won't that mean that nothing will ever be able to move, either?”
“It won't have to. It will be perfect, and frozen in that one instant for a timeless eternity. It's called the Divine Stasis.”
“It might be divine, but that doesn't really sound like a lot of fun.”
“That's because perfection exceeds what our puny merminds can understand. Time was a flaw in Ihop's universe. All this motion, all this change, it was never originally supposed to happen. But don't worry, the Divine Stasis isn't suppose to arrive for another million years.”
I said, “Good. I'd hate to have to cancel our date tonight.”
So let's all pray that Ihop in his infinite wisdom prevails down in the gulf states and the Rabbit of Chaos doesn't win the day...
~hugs, Veronica
"Government will only recognize 2 genders, male + female,
as assigned at birth-" (In his own words:)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1lugbpMKDU
Time and Pancakes
“That's our god, Ihop.”
“What's he the god of?”
So He's not the God of Pancakes then?
“No, not slow at all. Nine billion, eight hundred and seventy-six million, five hundred forty-three thousand, two hundred and ten times a second Ihop creates the universe; then turns into Puka-Harvi who destroys it; then turns back into Ihop and brings it all back---you, me, this ship, all the planets and stars and galaxies---only slightly different. It all happens faster than anyone can see, in the gaps between instants. But that's the reason things can move, and how what we call 'time' can even exist...”
"times a second", "then", "faster" seems to indicate that time must have existed for any of this to occur.
20,000 years ago, time was destroyed. It took almost a dozen millennia for time to be restored to its original form. So what happened during all that time during which time didn't exist?
In "The Thirteen Clocks": "That was then! It's now, now!"
-- Daphne Xu
Well, uh, you see...
There's two different types of time. There's the normal kind that we experience, and IHOP time, when all the other stuff takes place, which we couldn't even exist in. I sort of got that part from the incredibly drawn out mini-series version of Stephen King's THE LANGOLIERS- the time between time. It didn't make any sense there either. Religion is easy when you just make it up as you go along...
I just needed something that would keep the Sea-lonkan civilization from being just a bunch of underwater Hindus. And I used to joke about I-Hop being a lesser-known Egyptian pharaoh, the name was too good not to use here. His physical form followed from that: an eye that hops.
~hugs, Veronica
"Government will only recognize 2 genders, male + female,
as assigned at birth-" (In his own words:)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1lugbpMKDU
6 ft tall invisible white rabbit
Yes, but I only appear that way to my friends.
Harvey
The invisible part?
or the six-foot-tall white rabbit part?
-- Daphne Xu
Corpus Christi Hurricane Beulah
Being the dumb Okie that I was who had lived through a couple tornadoes, no hurricane scared me. Just a bigger whirlwind was all they are. Those who could evacuated way, way inland. We lived a half mile from the ocean. No big deal!
Obviously lived to tell the tale. Proves God takes care of the dumb ones! Most of south Texas was so flooded no vehicles could move over the highways for over a week. Flew hurricane relief (food, emergency supplies) for over a month afterwards. Make sure you have plenty of bottled water if you're sticking it out. You can survive for weeks without food. Days without water.
May God keep you and yours safe in the palm of His hand.
always,
Barb
Oklahoma born and raised cowgirl
Tornados and Hurricanes both for me.
The tornados come every year nothing too serious so far, and the Hurricanes are just a massive pain.
Tornados and Hurricanes its easy to build structures to handle, I just never want to be in an earth quake.
I always joke with people a structure to survive a tornado or Hurricane needs to be solid and strong able to handle the wind rain and floods.
Where as an earth quake the building needs to be able to shift and move without breaking.
We have bottled water and my house is on a private well, so we are covered there, its the people on City water I worry for, We also have a whole home Backup generator that has an auto switch, we put it in after Ike, 4 weeks without main power filling a generator fuel tank every 8 hrs was not fun, now after we got ours all our neighbors did the same. Generac has been doing a lot of business in Houston since Ike.
As long as we have power we have water, otherwise it will be down to the bottled stuff.
"Cortana is watching you!"
Oh, yeah?
Tell that to the residents of Moore, Oklahoma. Between 1998 and 2015 they have been hit 10 times, The bad ones, both F-5s, were in 1999 and 2013. The 1999 tornado had the highest wind speeds ever recorded, 301mph +/- 20mph. The 2013 tornado was an EF-5, and struck two schools in Moore. 7 children were killed.
The 2013 tornado hit two well-constructed homes, both were anchor-bolted to their foundations. Both were scoured away to the bare concrete. The 2013 tornado that hit El Reno was part of the same complex. Three long-time chasers, Tim Samaras, weather scientist and engineer, his son Paul, and research partner Carl Young were killed following this monster. Two Weather Channel spotters were injured.
I had the unenviable "honor" of paralleling this (1999) monster, which was showing no signs of dissipating. I was in constant radio contact with the NWS-Norman forecast office. Not something I ever want to do again.
So it isn't always possible to build a tornado-safe home. Don't tempt fate. Mother Nature will do what she wants.
"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin
I concede your point there.
Those EF-5 Tornados, those are not Tornados those are the Wrath Of God!
it is possible to build a structure to survive a nasty tornado but it either means lots of reinforced Concrete, or building into the ground. So Possible not always easy or cheap. But yea there are difficulties with that now in Oklahoma because it is o geologically active now, earthquake counter those building methods.
We have never had a really b ad tornado in this area since I have been alive, Small ones yes, just never the big acts of god with tornados.
But even a Small tornado will nap Pine Trees like toothpicks.
My great grandparents had a farm in Paris, Texas right south of the Oklahoma boarder, they had a tornado shelter, right out the kitchen door. But the problem with Houston for that is you can not really build down he water table is too high.
"Cortana is watching you!"
Slight correction
Building down into the ground is a recognized way to counter most earthquake threat. If the earth moves, you move with it. Contents may get rattled but unless a fissure opens in your precise location (and even then) you are probably safer than in an aboveground structure and no, you won't get crushed unless an asteroid lands on you too. It's a common misconception, even here in earthquake country, that down is a no-go. But actually, down is the safest way to build.
People complain that Southern California has the same weather all the time, but it's not true. We have four seasons just like the rest of the country. Instead of boring princess weather though, we have smog, wildfire, flashflood and earthquake seasons. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
earthquakes are easy
I have lived in cali LA to be exact all my life and feeling one coming is second nature by now, then add to that I lived in Pasadena near Cal-tech and the geology dept told us kids all the facts every year as a grad class they had to take.
But in our case, I will take the quakes!
As everything I own is still in the same pile...quakes are not a 'season' and every year! then add this...I run out of my house--I am safe! not so in tornado or hurricane! --and yes I know ''run out of building during Quake=bad! But in a house---run!
all i have to do is have food and water..some gas of the cars of the crap hits the blades and I am fine!
Proud member of the Whateley Academy Drow clan/collective
Interesting Experience
We were on vacation in LA, and the television news reported an earthquake -- on the east coast, in the DC-Baltimore area.
Then there was this earthquake story I heard once: it was said that one can recognize a magnitude-four earthquake at once, because it feels like a truck backing into the building. So at a convention of geologists, they felt something like a truck backing into the building, and immediately concluded that a magnitude-four earthquake had occurred. After the session, they went out and learned that a truck had backed into the building.
-- Daphne Xu
I'm right on the edge of the storm
so far a lot of rain but not much wind. Forecast to hang out in the area for days dropping a huge amount of rain. I also have gas for the generator and plenty of food and water. Fortunately in an area that doesn't flood but road flooding could keep us from going very far. Best wishes to all in the area of this storm.