I Hurricane I

This week marked our third hurricane since moving to the Tampa area—and our third "I" hurricane to boot: Irma (2017), Ian (2022), and now Idalia. Whereas we had many days leading up to Ian last year, Idalia felt like it popped up out of nowhere. The first I really knew of it was when my wife told me to do the weekly shopping Saturday, not Sunday. Whereas with Ian we knew school was cancelled for the whole week going into the weekend with an expected Tuesday landfall, Idalia had an expected Tuesday night landfall, but it wasn't until Monday afternoon that either the local schools or my university called off for Tuesday.

Monday was actually my first day of classes; the university spent the weekend and Monday morning beating the "no operational changes at this time" drum, which was annoying because we all knew something was coming. When I went over the schedule with my two morning classes, I was like, "Something about this will change, I will not see you Wednesday, but I don't know what." Finally around noon they called Tuesday and Wednesday off, so when I had my Monday afternoon classes, I had already adjusted the course schedule to make our next meeting Friday.

Son One helps put deck furniture in the shed.

We did our prep Tuesday morning (though I still kept a dentist appointment I had made), which was pretty low key: tie stuff down or move it to safe locations, make sure devices were charged and that we had ice in the event of a power outage. But even as we did all this and the rains began, across the course of the day it became clear the track was moving further and further west and we would have little to fear. (Storm surge closer to the coast, of course, but we are pretty far inland for that.) When we went to bed Tuesday night, it was raining decently hard, but there was no sign of even tropical storm–force winds, much less hurricane ones.

So Wednesday was a pretty chill day at home with my wife and the kids; the public schools resumed Thursday, and UT reopened at noon yesterday, meaning I will get my second day of class today, but if you have a Tuesday/Thursday morning class, you will go the whole first week without meeting your students!