Apparently, there is another possible hurricane on the way. The kids are excited, because it is meant to hit us on PSAT day - which means not having to come to school on a Saturday to take a big test.
I am not so excited about it, because storms are a lot of work. I'd rather read the PSAT script and do the mind-numbingly boring work of watching kids bubble in answers with a number 2 pencil. I'd even more so like to stay home and continue the productive work I did during our Fall Break (I canned and froze 20 lbs of pumpkin, deep cleaned the kitchen, and painted 10 interior doors).
I suppose if it is blowing 80 mile an hour winds on Saturday, I could still paint door jambs and organize closets, but I probably won't want to. I'll probably just be looking out the windows hoping more trees won't come down - or if they do, that they don't hit things like the house, the water tanks, or the barn. My husband really trimmed a lot of the heavy stuff off the bigger Mexican cypress that didn't fall down, hoping to encourage the trees to snap off at the top rather than pulling out at the roots like the other trees should there be another storm - that way, they'll probably just block the driveway, rather than smashing anything vital.
Hopefully, the storm will just scoot around us and be just a scare, because Puna district really doesn't need anymore of this. The lava is slowly, inchingly, heading for Pahoa town and if (when, they say) it crosses the highway, three communities will be cut off from the rest of the island - including several teachers from our school. There are alternate routes being worked on, but they will be dirt roads, very slow - and eventually, these routes will possibly cut off as the lava heads for the ocean. That will mean a 30 minute drive to town will turn into a 90 minute drive and there will be several thousand more cars on my highway (two-lane, not really built to handle that much traffic). They suffered a lot during Iselle (power, water, etc, out for weeks), and the lava is hanging over everyone's heads, and now, possibly another storm.
The last one was pretty scary - and I've been through a couple before. I think it was because it was largely at night. I kept hearing things outside, and we could see the trees whipping wildly by flashlight, and at 8 or 9, we could see the car port had come down - and there just wasn't a lot of information coming through. I thought, "If this is just the beginning, we're in real trouble."
This new storm might have higher winds than the last ones, but - then again - the uncertainty is there - it might just divert and go around. The vast majority of hurricanes in the Pacific over the years have done just that, actually, and if we hadn't just gone through one, I wouldn't even be worried.
I guess worrying doesn't do anything, anyway. No point. Maybe, I'll just admit to speculating. And I'll pick up some extra animal feed and fill the large water bottles in case our generator poops out again (it started AFTER the power came back on in August). We do have a little 12 volt pump that can charge on solar, so we can have some water from our tanks for toilets and (cold) baths, but the drinking water is a different matter. I am not looking forward to no cell, no land line, no internet, no lights, and minimal running water, but it's not really that big of a deal. The only thing that bothered me was not being able to tell my family on Oahu that we were fine.
Probably, it will be nothing.
