Hurricane Douglas

I’ll add updates to this post.

For reference, we are on the island of Oahu. Any video updates will be on Instagram stories (user name is tempestpilot).

Saturday

6am: A hurricane hasn't made catastrophic landfall since 1991, but it has been that kind of year. Nobody would be surprised if every hurricane of the season made landfall, one after another, like a meteorological stampede.

After work today I'll help cover the windows, round up the chickens, and put supplies in the basement in case we need to wrap up all the kids and cats in blankets and run down there. You have to go outside to get to the basement door, so that's not something that would be fun to do in roof-peeling wind.  

Usually the mynah birds, finches, and bulbuls cause a morning ruckus, but it’s silent. The roosters aren’t crowing. Feels weird.

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11am: emergency alarms just went off, phones all buzzing with hurricane warnings.

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6pm: after repair attempts, the windows are more broken. Stupid 50 year-old metal hinges. 

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Sunday 

8:40am: embarrassing update. So, the bedroom window now has no louvres at all, it’s just a bare screen. Critical fail. Then this morning two terrible things happened; Billy the Kitten had an enormous noodle-sized worm come out of his butt, and my mother also broke her window. She has plywood (but no saw) and cat butt-worm pills, so at 7am Mike packed up his power tools and drove toward the storm to get to her house, cut boards, cover her window, and retrieve the medicine. There’s a chance he’s going to get stranded there, the rain has started. So now it is me vs. the open windows. Anything worth doing is worth doing badly, I always say (I mean, doing a thing well is better, but sometimes the only way to do a thing is to just do it), so I cut up a bunch of boxes and duct taped cardboard over all the open windows. It looks like shit, but the rain is staying out so far. Then I baked a Dutch baby for the kids.

Sure, that’ll do it

Chocolate chips for breakfast, why not 

The worst part of all of this is that I wasn’t sure what the butt worm even was, it was impossibly big, I thought it was a rubber band. But then I thought maaaaybe it was moving, and the ends looked suspiciously parasitic, so I shook it into a baggie and then took a time lapse video of it to see if it was alive. This was a terrible, terrible idea. 

If anyone wants to see my gross time lapse butt-worm video, let me know. 

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11am: sirens just went off.

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1:45: Here is the very worst video:

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9pm: no wind, just distant low orange clouds going by. The cardboard worked, ha. Finished painting the heliconia and watched ET with the kids.