Hurricane Alert!!

It's that dreaded time of year again. No tourists season. Everything s l o w s d o w n and you wonder if you're ever going to have another customer in your life. It's hot and humid and the A/C is maxed out and your employees are maxed out and you're thinking about your business and you think, "What was I thinking? This isn't any fun!!" A lot of businesses just say "heck with it" and close for the month of August or September.

But then it gets interesting. A hurricane happens!! Hooray!! It forms up South of the Baja Peninsula and starts coming North. Actually nobody says "Hooray" except our friends who have never actually lived through one. But the point is that a hurricane certainly breaks up the monotony.

So right now we have a fairly strong hurricane bearing down on us. Her (I think) name is "Jimena." That is pronounced "He may nah" more or less using English. (Sorry if I sound like some mean teacher talking to bad students but some people just don't know how to pronounce words written in Spanish)

According to the prognosticators, Señorita Jimena will show us her fury sometime Tuesday. So we're busy making sure the generator works, checking for loose stuff outside, moving things away from the windows and fun stuff like that. You don't want things lying around that can blow through a window.

I've had the dubious pleasure of being here for every hurricane since Isis in 1998. I think 1998; my memory really wants to block out the first one. We were house and baby sitting for some friends who had gone to San Francisco for their anniversary. They were only gone one day when the hurricane decided to show and it was on top of us very quickly. So we were in this Fabulous house over-looking the Sea of Cortez with our 2 boys, 6 and 12 and their 4 kids, 5 through 14. The kids made their own plan, covered the whole floor of a large walk-in closet with pillows, took in a tv and vcr, every soft drink in the house and every bit of "portable" food. So while we were bailing water, saving expensive artwork, squeezing out towels and generally panicking about these peoples' nice house, the kids thought we were having a noisy picnic. In the end there was no permanent damage to our friends' beautiful house.

So here we go, a day or 2 of speuclation and watching the internet updates. See you on the other side.