Just a quick note, as it's getting late and I find myself working manically to prepare.
As of now . . . about 10:30 p.m. on Friday night . . . Hurricane Gustav is still looming just south of the Gulf of Mexico. Orleans Parish officials have announced that contraflow (both sides of the highways going north) will begin Sunday morning, possibly Saturday night. Jefferson Parish officials have announced that their mandatory evacuation will commence tomorrow morning.
I live close to and work in Jefferson Parish, so my ass is hitting the highway tonight/early tomorrow to avoid the traffic.
While the models are showing Gustav taking a west turn and heading more toward western LA/Texas, we're still in the National Hurricane Center's three-day cone of uncertainty, and Gus hasn't even hit the Gulf of Mexico yet. Despite the trends, all bets are off, as Mother Nature is notoriously unpredictable.
Better safe than sorry, methinks, so we're bugging out and heading north. After all, it is Labor Day weekend, and it certainly can't hurt to be sipping drinks by a pool somewhere instead of waiting out a potential storm.
So we'll see how far my car makes it. I need a vacation anyway.
Here's hoping that Gustav continues west into anywhere else but southeast Louisiana. I really don't want to see any fellow Louisianians get the brunt of this storm either, but I think wishing Gustav would disappear in a poof of smoke is probably unreasonable, despite the voodooish ceremony my roommates and I performed involving two voodoo dolls and my rubber alligator, Boudreaux.
What can I say? We tried.
By the way, am I the only one who thinks it's just wrong to give a hurricane a name whose first four letters are "GUST"?
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