Hurricane Hoodoo

New Orleans is gettin busy, y'all.
Holdin its panic in its teeth.
Gustav is on its way, draggin its little sisters and brothers behind.
They've just issued a mandatory evacuation for Lafourche Parish, just downriver from us. St. Charles is up, too. As are Vermilion, Iberia and Saint Mary Parishes. I'm sure Orleans isn't far behind.
The storm's still a ways off, but, y'know, folks are a little paranoid around here.
Justifiably so.
Since we're in a pretty good spot to avoid flooding and the worst of the wind (downtown/riverside of the Vieux Carre), we're planning on staying put. We're gonna go get the generator and the propane setup out of storage for cooking. We're grabbing what we can. We're looking at losing a bunch of stuff that's in storage out in Arabi. Losing our truck if the flooding creeps up past the 400 block of Chartres. All our family, though, seems to be pretty well prepared. As much as we can be.
Otter's brother is an Air Force commander, most closely associated with the Cajun Militia of F-16 pilots, and has already been deployed to a little town just down from Baton Rouge. Ready to go where needed. Knowing how kind and levelheaded Otter's brother is, how empathetic and just, I can only hope he will have a large measure of influence among his troops. People in distress don't need fuckin guns pointed at 'em. Not like last time.
Last night, we weighed and discussed evacuation. Since we're so well located for the moment, we figure we might be pretty well placed to feed people if they need it, to provide extra sleeping room for folks, to do whatever the hell we can to assist those in more dire circumstances than ourselves. We also don't want to risk leaving and then not being able to get back, stuck watching everything unfold on television. Since there's risk involved with both leaving and staying, we'd rather take our chances here and maybe be able to actively participate in ameliorating the aftermath. Lord knows there's never enough people around for that.
We've pretty much got NOAA's hurricane preparedness setup, y'know, set up. Now, I'm listenin to the beautiful Ms. Caux Caux Robicheaux' recommendations for hurricane preventative hoodoo:
Take any water glass,
Fill it with any kind of water,
Place the waterglass in any windowsill,
Place any pair of scissors, open, across the top of the glass.
This cuts the hurricane in half.
Now, as long as the casement windows don't blow violently closed and knock everything off the windowsill, I'll get to see how well this works. I wonder if there are laws of saturation, or some such, concerning hoodoo's efficacy. Like does this work for Caux Caux because she's on a far less populated island? Would it still work if she were the only one among hundreds of thousands, as opposed to just plain ol' thousands? Is it something that works better with a higher ratio of hoodoo workers to people just expecting the storm to come on in and destroy everything?
We're as prepared as we can be.
Now we're just a city full of folks holdin their breath.

Funny how things you've been kinda expecting have such a habit of kinda sneakin up on you.