auchmeddan

Got held up at work tonight working on a laptop which was running the WinXP User Interface in Italian. As I couldn’t change the UI to English (it’s XP home) I had to rely on Icons and good guesses…it was kinda fun. I wouldn’t usually mess around with a home users laptop, but I was at a loose end at the end of the day and really couldn’t resist the challenge of troubleshooting software problems in a foreign language. I even learned to read a little Italian to boot! (no pun intended).

As I drove the bike home I could feel the wind had picked up a little, but nothing all that bad yet. When I reached the gas station down the road from us I had to laugh - people are already filling their cars in panic. The station had at least 20 cars in it, and there is only 4 pumps! Cars were blocking each other in all over the place, and I’m not sure how anybody was going to get back out.

Jules and myself are a bit more relaxed about NATE. We have done the sensible stuff like stow our patio furniture and BBQ away safely, and have closed the storm shutters over the patio doors. We have some canned food, tons of chips, plenty of soft drinks and beer (thanks Jules!) and Jules has cooked some meals we can easily heat over the BBQ should we need to.
Hmmm..it sounds more like planning a party than preparing for a storm!

To put things in perspective, NATE is currently only a Tropical Storm that is likely to hit us worst around 16:00 on Thursday 8th Sept. It means tomorrow won’t be pretty, and may turn into a Category 1 Hurricane, but it’s not exactly “The Day After Tomorrow” either. We lost all power island wide in July and everyone started panic buying then as well…and it was a total waste of time.

Of course, I could be wrong. NATE could turn into a Hurricane, and could decide to concentrate all it’s efforts on our only (already damaged) power plant, and could knock power out for days. I really doubt it though. I still think we’ll be out diving this weekend.

If you want to see how the storm is tracking, go to Shark Oil and use the Animated Storm Tracker option.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 7th, 2005 at 3:44 pm and is filed under General Day-to Day Stuff, Bermuda. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.