“I Thought I Heard a Scream and a Thump”

I’m sitting around watching the storm news. It’s not easy to stop, because it keeps changing all the time. One minute, you’re sure the problem is gone. The next, it seems to be headed your way again.

I guessed this thing would land near Apalachicola, endangering possibly tens of homes and a half-built Valero station. Sadly for me, it made a lurch to the east between 5 p.m. and 8 p.m., so now it’s looking more like it will be maybe 30 miles east of Apalachicola, making it closer to me as it passes my latitude.

I can’t believe they named the storm Debby. They spelled it wrong, and every self-anointed wit on the web is saying things like, “Debby does Tampa.”

The TV weather people look unbelievably disappointed. I can almost hear the men thinking, “I waxed my chest for this?” Not that I’m saying all TV weathermen are gay. I’m sure some of them are not.

They thought it would be a hurricane at 8 p.m. tonight, and it’s still just a tropical storm. The farther it goes without becoming a hurricane, the less likely it is to to make the cut and the weaker it will be when it finally finds Florida.

It’s so lame, they’re forecasting gusts, not sustained winds. Gusts are the smartphone filters of hurricane forecasts. They make storms seem much more impressive than they are.

Andrew hit my dad’s house down south with sustained winds of about 170 miles per hour. Debby is forecast to hit Crystal River, which will be closer to the eye than I am, with 46 mile-per-hour gusts. That could mean sustained winds of 20 or even 10 miles per hour. We had a stiff gust early this afternoon–maybe 25 miles per hour–when the background wind was basically nonexistent.

Saying a storm has 70 mile-per-hour gusts is like Burt Reynolds saying, “I’m about six-one,” when everyone knew he wore boots with 4″ heels.

Some guy from Accuweather was practically squawking that Debby would be Category 2 upon arrival. He wanted to sound serious, so he didn’t use his indoor voice. Channel 10 in Tampa, in contrast, has given up. They keep saying, “This will not be a WIND storm.” If it’s not a wind storm where you are, it’s not a hurricane. It means the real hurricane either missed you or didn’t exist.

I think they see the writing on the wall and don’t want to be embarrassed.

Debby was “doing” 70 at 8 p.m., already north of Tampa, and Cat 2 starts at 96. I do not see that happening.

Debby could be one of those storms that shocks everyone, but obviously, unusual storms are less likely than normal storms.

Channel 8 has a thing they call the Wobble Tracker, and it’s really just a live radar feed with the historic and anticipated future track superimposed on it. At 9:20, it looked like the eye of the storm was breaking up and moving back west a little. I wonder if it’s dying. That would be great. And hilarious.

I have already suffered with this storm, though. We got maybe two hours of very heavy rain, and we had dinner while it was coming down. I looked out the window while we were eating, and I saw water coming over the side of a roof gutter instead of going out the downspout.

I have a guy who cleans my gutters, but I don’t believe in calling him unless I see a problem. I looked at the gutters several weeks ago, and I thought they were fine. Looks like I was wrong.

I went outside in the nasty rain and saw that water was pouring over the top of the downspout, so something was blocking the flow.

I thought maybe there were leaves inside the downspout. I paid to have the leaves removed from the gutter, but I never mentioned the downspouts.

I really did not want to climb out a bedroom window and try to check the gutter and downspouts from the roof. I did not want to ruin my wife’s Sunday by dying. I came up with a plan. I got my giant backpack blower, inserted the nozzle in the bottom of one downspout, and fired away. Black, rotten leaves and dirty water blew out of the downspout, and most of it came down on my back.

The water flowed better, but I was not sure all was well.

As I was already wet and filthy, I decided to get on a ladder and look at the gutter from the top. There was a lot of junk in there. I reached in and pulled some out, but I knew where I was going. It wasn’t enough.

Before long, I was on the roof in pouring rain, wearing only gym shorts and hiking shoes, grabbing filth out of the gutter and throwing it in a mop bucket. Nice. Welcome to home ownership. You have to fix stuff when it needs to be fixed, regardless of whether it’s fun. Otherwise, you pay a steep price. It’s not like being a kid or a tenant. They get to do nothing.

It was better than having water back up into the house and ruin the kitchen ceiling. I came back in, covered with dirty water, and asked my wife if she was glad she wasn’t the husband at that moment. She most certainly was.

She told me how lame most husbands seemed to her, compared to me. I didn’t see that coming. She said most men can’t do anything. Her brother-in-law’s rented house had a bad lock on a gate, and when his family moved to another house, a locksmith had to be called to fix it.

It’s nice to be appreciated. All those years getting acquainted with tools have paid off. It’s too bad I didn’t know enough about gutters, though.

Now the gutter and downspouts are 90% clean, which is enough to keep the water moving until the storm goes away. I plan to make a PVC-pipe tool to attach to a blower to reach into the gutter and blow leaves out. Doing it by hand is not very safe, since the only thing between me and concrete is a pool enclosure screen. Part of the roof by the pool is very steep.

I am going to try to go to sleep. The storm looks like it’s getting weaker, not stronger, and in any case, it appears to pose no threat to my property. There is a chance a neighbor’s tree could fall across a wire and kill my power, but that’s about as bad as it should get.

Luckily for me, a power company employee lives on this street.