In the midst of it

Last night there was hardly anything on TV but hurricane news. That's good and all, but after like hour twelve of coverage, it gets pretty repetitive, and you start hearing the newscasters tell stories about their dogs' reactions to past hurricanes, slow reenactments of the face they made that morning when they woke up and saw the increased windspeed rating, and they take phone calls from people who are sitting at home speculating what may or may not happen- usually "looks like a lotta rain over here." Every so often they interrupt all of the channels to put on a tornado warning.

So part of the news coverage included this woman last night who explained that after the hurricanes of last year it was discovered that there was a "non-English speaking community" near Mobile who didn't get any weather service in their native tongue. She went on to explain repeatedly that they wanted to help out the "hispanic speaking" community and they had gone to great lengths this year and found this genius miracle of a woman: someone who spoke "hispanic". Once as she was introducing this miracle-of-modern-science that is a bilingual person, she accidentally almost said "Spanish" and corrected herself, "Spa-Hispanic speaking." As they introduced the woman who gave emergency instruction in Spanish, both the newscaster and her co-host stared at the translator as though she'd ridden up on a unicorn and successfully demonstrated the main principals of astrophysics through interpretive dance. Afterward the station was really self congratulatory on their thorough 20-second spot dedicated to the "Hispanic speaking" community.

Here's how it looks in our backyard at this moment:



We're heading out to take pictures. I know that sounds stupid but we're really not that close to the actual action.