Best news yet

The latest track from NOAA is just out and posted below. Grand Cayman is the third Island from the right outlined in red. Keep praying it moves farther south. We are going over to Kathleen and Keith's for a little while to eat some snack food and maybe drink some adult beverages. Will be back by 5:00 p.m. to update assuming we have Internet. Love to you all.

Scott and Katie

3:00 p.m. update

Its encouraging that in 24 hours this will all be over one way or the other. The news continues to be a southward drift of the eye. Lets all pray that continues.

We have truly seen the best in people in the last three days as our neighbors and friends have banded together. It started on Thursday when a small but concerted group of people got an entire college wrapped up and moved into three rooms. It continued on Friday with a donation of 46 pieces of plywood to cover all the windows when there was no way the college could afford to purchase it or the labor that followed. We saw it yesterday in Lonny and his men riding to our rescue when we had no idea how to put up the plywood at our place and didn't have enough anyway. We have seen it in our neighbors Keith and Kathleen who told us where to move our car, who drove us to get gasoline and additional groceries today when we were vehicle less and we see it in every place where people are banding together to help each other get ready.

If there is one thing that has made us totally at peace with our decision to come to Cayman and work at ICCI it is the way everyone on this Island has banded together to help each other get through this. What an extraordinary thing to see. It is as strong a reminder as we could get that community is very important here and that the decision to come here was the right one.

Windy now but no rain. We have put all the furniture on cans and will post pictures later if possible. We are eating lunch late. Everything is upstairs and the very final preparations are all that is left and those wont happen until late tonight. We love you all.

Scott and Katie

First time jitters

Well that little band of rain has passed through pretty quickly and it is actually sunny out again. Our neighbors went inside for a few minutes and are back outside again now doing work. Fortunately we don't have much stuff and nothing outside while our neighbors with their elaborate yards and patios have much to do in their final preparations. They don't seem to be fazed by the winds and the rain was just a temporary annoyance. We are newbies and everything is fazing us. The latest NOAA track and the announcement on the Cayman Compass website is that the track is more favorable moving south so if that continues things wont be as bad as it looked yesterday. The difference between 80 mile an hour winds and 140 miles is pretty substantial and if it will just move south a little more (and not move north in its track at all) we will feel a little more secure.

Sorry for the false alarm. Will keep updating as long as Internet stays on.

Love you all.

Scott and Katie

1:00 p.m.

Starting to rain and wind has picked up a lot now. We are moving everything upstairs and making final preparations. If we lose internet we will try and get messages out as best we can. Thanks for all the e-mails of encouragement and conversations we have had this morning with family. We love you all.

Scott and Katie

Still nameless kittens

On a good note, we have the cutest kittens ever with us!

And so it begins....

While waiting for Scott to figure out what kind of oil we need for the generator, I asked Keith, "So when should we expect the outer bands of the storm to hit?" He looked at me funny, looked around a bit, then said in his Eastern London accent, "You're seeing it right now."

The winds have definitely picked up and all the palm trees are swaying around. It is a bit disconcerting since the eye of Dean is still 400 miles away. We made a trip to get gasoline and oil for the generator. The first gas station was already out of gas but we were able to find gas at the second station we went to with Kathleen. That station was out of oil so we will not be able to use our generator but have worked out a barter agreement with Kathleen and Keith that we will bring our gas and cook with them after the storm has passed.

Hurley's, the closest grocery store, was going to be open until 3 today but it has decided to only stay open till noon as we are already seeing the effects of the storm.

I asked our neighbor, Kathleen, whether or not we needed to hunker down in the bathroom during the storm (like one would during a tornado) or if it would be safe to be walking around the house since she had indicated that they were not going to raise any of their furniture until the water actually started coming into the house. It was reassuring to hear her say that, since we had boarded up the house, we would be safe walking around, unless our roof went.

The internet has started to slow down so we aren't sure how much longer we will have an internet connection. We haven't seen five bars since yesterday and are now moving between three and four bars (three is the minimum you need for a connection). We are now going to do the last of the preparations and will try to update the blog at least one more time.

It is sad that we were never able to do the grand tour of the house before Dean, but here are some pictures of the outside of the house now that it is all boarded up. Top to Bottom: The front of our unit (the complex has two of these units facing each other), the front of our place (we are the window/door on the left), and the back of our place (you can see the top of our patio doors and our upstairs window). Being one of the middle two units helps with everything (i.e. flooding and wind); our unit only got three inches of flooding in Ivan while some of them got almost a foot.

Sunday Morning Good News

This morning we got the good news that the National Hurricane Center tracking has Dean drifting further south and now moving at 18 mph up one mile in speed. Cayman is now officially under a Hurricane warning after being on a Hurricane watch yesterday. This morning we will finish all of the small preparations in the condo for the storm. This afternoon we will put all the furniture we can on cans of beans and other canned goods that we bought cheap yesterday not to be part of our hurricane food but just to serve as something to elevate the furniture. I helped our neighbor Keith put up some plywood yesterday and will help him again this morning to finish his place. It sounded like it rained over night but with the plywood up you cant see out so we cant be sure. It is sunny now with a little wind. One thing about the plywood being up is that our house is very dark (Katie reminds me that it is like my den of darkness that I used to keep in Fort Worth with all my blinds shut though this is much darker). It will also make this place hot and steamy when we lose power so the battery operated fan we have will become extremely important.

We don't want to get too excited by the change in track because it has changed so much in the last 24 hours and could move again when it hopefully now skirts Jamaica rather than hitting it head on. There is another sound that is happening a lot this morning, the sound of planes taking off. We are about three miles from the airport and can see them lifting off from our parking lot. Katie and I have talked about going down and standing in the long lines at the airport to try and leave. It would be hard to get on a plane (not to mention outrageously expensive though money wasn't the deciding factor) but together we decided we were staying. This isn't like the US where you can drive away from the coast after you get your house ready. If we leave it could be a long time before we get back in. From the Ivan experience we have heard that the people who left had a hard time finding out anything and the not knowing was worse than the knowing. We are reasonably confident of our safety so while the absolute safest course would be to leave we are calculating that we have done all we could to make this place secure, it is on high ground and we have moved our car to high ground.

Radio Cayman has an 8:00 a.m. update that we are listening to now. Dean is 490 miles from us now. Maximum winds are 145 miles per hour. Hurricane force winds are extending out 60 miles and Tropical storm winds out 205 miles. We should get 10-12 inches of rain. Little Cayman about 80 miles from here is being completely evacuated. They will be instituting a curfew tonight. The police seem to be out making their presence known. There was a lot of looting post-Ivan so obviously the government wants to do a better job this time. There should be a new track around 10 this morning so keep checking the NOAA website. Will update throughout the day on our status.

Josie and the Kittens

I was awakened this morning by high-pitched meows. One of the kittens, the bravest and most adventuresome, had ventured out from the cage and was frightened. He had made it all the way to the bathroom mat and was in panic mode. Josie was watching him from afar so he was still safe but he didn't realize where he was or how to get back. We aren't sure how good a cat's eyes are at that young; are they still mostly blind at 4-5 weeks (if they are even that old)?

After holding him for a while and getting him to calm down, he climbed down my leg and made his way back to his mom and brother, who was also out exploring. It is interesting that I love the boy kitties because they are so much more fun, make you laugh more often, and get into all sorts of trouble; the two brothers will play, awkwardly, while their sister calmly sleeps or curls up next to her surrogate mother. Scott on the other hand prefers the calm, togetherness of the girls.

After a bit more exploring, this time closer to mom, the brothers decided to curl up with their sister.

Late night wrap up

As darkness fell the sound of drills and saws slowly wound down. There is a strange calm about people around us almost a sense of false bravado behind which is real concern that this one is going to be Ivan all over again or perhaps even worse. We weren't here for Ivan and so that makes it all the more scary for us. We have no sense that hey I survived Ivan, I can survive this.

We caught a bit of the evening news when we were at Elsa's securing our ride to go park our vehicle and the news was pointing out something we had seen, even though the supermarkets and hardware stores were chaotic it was organized chaos and people are appearing to be calm. The sense that we are all in this together is quite strong and you see a lot of people going out of their way to help others just as Lonny went out of his way to help us this morning. The lessons of Ivan have definitely been learned as everyone is getting ready. The traffic today was much heavier than we have seen in a while and it seemed like the whole Island was out and about. Yet as the evening wore on there is a sense we are all just in full on waiting mode. For us it is even stronger since we have no car anymore and while we have our bikes as the weather worsens tomorrow we will really just be hunkering down here and watching the clock.

We have taken all the paintings off the walls and moved everything into cabinets so there are no loose items downstairs except our hurricane tubs which we will close up and move last. We have one full tub of food, one with 11 gallons of water and a third with items like batteries, bleach, flashlights, radio, tools, gloves, boots, tarps etc. We will also move the generator last up the stairs. When Katie's parents visited last month they brought a hurricane kit from Costco which will be invaluable as well. We wrote out a list of things for tomorrow that we want to do as the day progresses. We expect to have power and Internet until late and will blog as much as we can until we feel we have to unplug everything and pack it up. As the storm approaches though, the connection may be slow as we have wireless Internet not a land line. There are three towers on the Island and who knows if Westar keeps them up and running or pulls them down well ahead of the storm.

Katie couldn't bear the thought of the cats being downstairs tonight and convinced me that they needed to get to know the upstairs before the freight train blows through tomorrow night and scares them all to pieces. It was really just an excuse to get them closer to us so she can play with them but that's OK its a nice distraction.

Tonight we made our steak and corn on the cob. We actually watched a few episodes of Scrubs on the portable DVD player to get our minds off what is happening. Tomorrow we eat the chicken from our freezer. If we are going to lose use of the refrigerator and freezer for a while we need to empty it out so big meals tomorrow for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

What we have realized today is that we are really invested in this place. We believe in why we are here and we feel encouraged by the changes we have helped bring about at the college and the people we have gotten to work with. Both of us realize we now view this as our home and we cant just leave it even with what we now face.

The last 60 hours (really since Noon Thursday) getting the college ready have seemed like a month, its hard to remember what we were doing Wednesday that we thought was so important. The waiting part is a double edged sword. It gives us more than enough time to prepare here and at the college but it also is mentally draining because you cant keep yourself psyched up and prepared all the time. The truth is we are scared and this is not an adventure or exciting or anything that three days ago, a lifetime ago, we might have thought. We want it over but we want it not to happen at all, one of life's little ironies.

Saturday Evening Update: The Shelter Opens for Refugees

As night begins to fall here we have taken a couple of significant steps. After another visit to the college to check on the status of boarding windows (about 80% done and hopefully they are back tomorrow to finish), we drove around looking for a spot to put the car as the likely flooding at our place would destroy the engine (the salt water).

We found a couple of good spots and ultimately picked the Truman Bodden Sports Complex in George Town. You can easily find all the high ground now as the cars are all parked there in mass. We thought we would drive the car over tomorrow but when we spoke with an officer at the sports complex he said it would fill up tonight. We were very encouraged by the fact that all of the police and civic vehicles are parked in the field there at the complex. The field is about three feet higher than the parking lot but the lot was quickly filling up and the officer there told us the lot didn't get any flooding from Ivan. There are trees but at some point you just pick your poison and if trees are being uprooted our little car is going flying all on its own.

We drove back to Elsa and Keith's (they arrived back on Island yesterday) and secured a ride from Elsa. She followed us back to the complex where we parked, disconnected the battery and put it in the back. The car is locked up and as secure as we can make it, if the little guy is meant to survive he will. Katie wants to call the car Andreas. If he survives, Andreas it is; if he dies, his name is Money down the drain.

We also welcomed four refugee's from Cayman Brac into our home to ride out the storm. Josie and her three adopted children will be with us for the next couple of days. Our neighbor Kathleen is a worker with the humane society and they need foster homes for their cats during the storm so with the news that Kira, who is allergic to cats, would not be on Island and needing a place to stay, we volunteered. Josie apparently lost her babies and is now a surrogate mother to three as of now unnamed kittens all about 4 or 5 weeks old. They are in our downstairs bathroom for now but will come up stairs tomorrow in case of flooding. Katie is absolutely atwitter about the kitties. We keep telling ourselves we have to be brave for the cats now so they don't get scared.

The latest track again has Dean moving a little south but it has slowed to 17 miles an hour so good and bad news. We want it to track further south and move faster so the effects aren't as long lasting. By comparison Ivan was five miles off the coast and moving at 3 miles an hour. Tomorrow will be the big day for tracking as the hurricane should hit Jamaica around 2 p.m. and being over land and hitting the mountains there could affect its course. We may update late tonight and certainly by early tomorrow. Will be going to sleep early today since unlikely to get much sleep tomorrow or for next several days as we have been warned that the sound of the hurricane is overwhelming, and then post hurricane, the generators are extremely loud.

The hardest part about all of this, right now, is the waiting. In no other natural disaster do you have so much prior knowledge, which is a blessing and a curse.

Early Saturday Afternoon update

The plywood is in place (thanks to our new best friend Lonny) so we are now getting the house ready. We have moved all of our stuff upstairs and are going to pack up and then put trash bags over important things like the laptop, I-home etc. The problem is not the wind as long as we stay in, its the flooding so we want everything off the ground. After some house rearranging this morning, we ran over to the college to check on progress there and then Katie biked back here so now both our bikes are at the new residence and safely stored in the upstairs bedroom. I went to the hardware store to get some sealant foam that Lonny recommended to use on doors as the water rises and we also stopped at Fosters and got some marinating sauce as well as treating ourselves to some cake and soda. We are having steak, corn on the cob and the cake for dessert tonight, morbidly we joke about our last supper with electricity for a while. Our neighbor Keith says it was six weeks after Ivan before electricity was restored in this neighborhood. The government is better prepared but who knows what will happen this time. The track is back to right at us and it has slowed which is bad news too. Today is a beautiful day in Cayman, hot and humid but the waters are clear and the sky has just a few clouds, you would never know something was up (except if you go to a hardware store or supermarket where it is organized chaos).

I used to think my enduring memory of Cayman would be the sound of the free range roosters. This may change Sunday night and Monday morning but right now the sound of Cayman is drills and saws as everyone boards up.

Will update this evening.

10:45 am update - the cavalry arrives

Lonny has just arrived and brought with him much relief for Scott. We thought that Lonny was going to be able to get here around 7 am and help us get ready but he has had many different obligations to help with different places since he does contract work that we were a bit down the line. Scott puts a lot of stock in what Lonny says since he knows his stuff so Scott was getting very worried the later he was. We didn't have enough plywood and no way of putting it up ourselves and so we needed him to come or else we would be completely screwed.

When Lonny showed up a a trailer of plywood, like gold around here right now, and four extra men, you could tell a whole ton of bricks had just lifted off Scott's shoulders.

Scott had decided that if Lonny said it was safe, we would ride the storm out here. Lonny indicated that once we get all of the windows boarded up and everything elevated off the floor downstairs, we would be fine.

Right now I can hear the electric drill getting all of those wonderful pieces of plywood up over our windows. (We know that after everything calms down from Dean, we will be buying an electric drill, oh, and hurricane shutters.....) When you go outside today, you hear drills and saws all over the island; everyone is getting ready.

I am glad that Lonny brought some relief for Scott because his whole outlook had crashed when he saw how fortified our neighbors' houses were becoming and realized that we had nothing to protect our place. Now, at least, he has been smiling and seems more ready to face what is coming now that we know our house will be protected, we will have a safe place to stay, and we have a plan to get our car to safety.

This morning we thought we had good news regarding the path of Dean since it had moved south of us just a bit, but, after checking just now, it is back to coming right over the island. It has already reached a Category 4, and it is predicted that it will become a Category 5 before hitting the island. The hope is that it will lose some of the intensity before it actually hits us but we will keep you guys updated as the weekend progresses.

Keep us in your prayers.

Saturday Morning Status

The hurricane is now projected to be a category five when it crosses near Jamaica to the south and east of us. Should be a four or a five when it gets to us Monday. The arrival time keeps changing now it looks like four or five a.m. It continues to drift south and that is a good thing according to our neighbors. We want it to pass south because of the wind directions and where our windows are. The problem is that it is slowing down. Ivan buzz sawed Cayman for 36 hours, if this one slows down and stays on line with the Island it could do the same. We will meet with Lonny in a little while and find out about our windows. Will update as we find things out. Today will be a long day of preparations.

8:00 p.m. update

This evening things are looking up from a personal perspective even as the news continues to be bad. We bought a cell phone and have charged it so we can use it in an emergency. I spoke with Lonny Tibbetts, one of our instructors who is a contractor and he is coming over tomorrow morning early with some men to help us with the windows and hopefully with solutions to our lack of plywood and inability to do something about the upstairs window. I also spoke with our neighbors Keith and Kathleen (nice coincidence) who rode out Ivan here. They said that the structures are fine and the windows are fine (boarded up) but there will be flooding. They suggested moving our car on Sunday to higher ground and when they move theirs we will do same and carpool back. They also suggested getting Katie's bike from the college in case we have to be without a vehicle for a while either because of flooding or because there is no gasoline. They also have a good generator and 15 gallons of gasoline so our fears of using the generator without supervision can be set aside. They also said that the neighborhood basically watched after everyone post Ivan and that it would be the same. Based on what Lonny can do and our discussion with the neighbors we may ride it out here.

Tomorrow early we go to the college and get Katie's bike, then back here to meet Lonny and board up windows etc. Then we help our neighbors do their windows and batten down the hatches. Will do another update as information arises or by tomorrow mid morning.

Friday 4:00 p.m. Update

The news this afternoon continues to be bad. At 12:00 noon they broke into all the radio stations and announced that the eye is now headed for Grand Cayman and if there are no changes in direction, (and there have been three in just the last 24 hours) we get hit straight on by it Monday morning. The buildings all around are starting to get boarded up. We spent the whole morning and early afternoon at the college wrapping everything in garbage bags and moving everything to the two inner rooms. We did line up plywood for the college and tomorrow morning some workers are supposed to come nail it up.

We are now home and starting our own preparation. We have discovered to our dismay that the plywood left for us doesn't fit the downstairs windows so not only do we have an upstairs issue but also a downstairs one too. We will spend the rest of the day getting what we can together for the kit to be ready and as best we can the house. We are also going over to check out the librarians residence and see how secure it is. She is being evacuated by her husbands company so we would have the place. She also has hurricane shutters but at present no plywood for her patio doors. We are now reconsidering the college because it will be boarded up. If it does hit at category four which was what Ivan was then wherever we are will not be safe so we are trying to make safest decision possible.

We haven't gotten a cell phone yet and while that hasn't been an issue up until now, it means that at present we don't have ways of getting in touch with people here. Our little car is not going to stand a chance of there is any significant flooding so our biggest worry (besides getting through this) is that we will be trapped with no way of communicating with anyone.

As I type this Katie is talking with her sister Mel on windows live so Internet seems to be fine. We will keep updating throughout weekend until they turn off the power sometime Sunday before it arrives. Thanks for the e-mails with encouragement. Lets all hope that there is yet another change of track and it moves somewhere north or south of here and all we deal with is a tropical storm force winds and rain. Those on windows live watch for us and we can talk etc.

The waiting time

At first this was something to laugh off; then it was a little exciting, the prospect of an adventure looming, but now with the stark reality staring us in the face its just scary. The entire mood of the Island has changed and you can see the concern in everyone's face. Everything really began to get serious when we got to work around noon. Students started calling about classes this evening because they were leaving work to buy supplies and ply wood. When Katie called workplaces today she got answering machines and we all started looking around and realizing everything at the college that wasn't ready. Then the TV appearance for tomorrow was cancelled as the morning show will just be on weather preparations and all the little signs came crashing down on us that this is really happening.

We prepared an ad hoc hurricane plan with 33 different tasks to complete for the college. The plan is from three people who have never been through a hurricane and one who has been through several so who knows if we covered everything. We immediately started implementing the plan as best we could. I went to A.L Thompson hardware to get supplies for the college and a store that had been empty two hours earlier when Katie and I stopped for our supplies was now packed. The supermarket next door had a full parking lot in the middle of the day as well. Katie began moving all the student files into the records room filing cabinets all but one (which was donated Tuesday) of which have damage from Ivan. We cant use any of the bottom drawers because of flooding concerns so moving files in and securing them was a good eight hour long task While Katie did that I began moving computers, chairs, supplies, books and everything else to inside rooms without windows. We have no plywood for the college windows and so I spent part of the evening trying to run that down but so far no luck.

Dr. Cummings and April are not on Island yet and even though they are scheduled to arrive tomorrow there is a good chance the government will not allow in coming flights with people just empty planes for evacuation and besides we don't have food for them. Our business manager is also off island so the college is understaffed as it is.

Tomorrow we will go in early and spend the morning moving everything in the college to safe locations. Hopefully the construction company I spoke with tonight that rebuilt the college will get plywood out to board up at least some of the windows by Saturday evening. In any event at 2 p.m. we are leaving and worrying about our own place. The new house is great but apparently not in the best neighborhood for flooding. Something that we probably should have been a little more curious about two weeks ago. The house is raised but the neighborhood around isn't so there is a chance with severe flooding we could be trapped.

The strange thing is the current weather, sunny and nice. You would never know from looking at the sky what was headed this way. This really is just a period of waiting and watching and constantly checking the net and the radio for updates.

We are debating whether to ride out the storm at a shelter, here at our new home or at the residence of our librarian. We have plywood and nails for the two downstairs windows but nothing right now for the upstairs one and that is what we will spend tomorrow afternoon working on. If we get sufficient covering for the windows we will ride it out here. We don't want to ride it out at the college because the roof leaks, it is in a worse flood plain than our place (of course the whole Island is a flood plain not being much above sea level anywhere), and there is no way to cover all the windows so flying objects would be a tremendous concern. All of the students we talked tonight were glad we don't still live at the college. Even as they warned us about Selkirk drive they said it was better than the college.

The storm looks like it will come through Monday morning. The track is for the eye to be south of the Island. It should be a category four while it passes us at around 8 a.m. Monday then lessening as it heads for the Yucatan Peninsula and then into the Gulf of Mexico. We will keep updating the blog through Sunday afternoon and early evening until we have to move everything or go to a public shelter. If the storm looks like it will track right for the island we are looking at flights but right now there are literally no flights off the island on line so that must mean only evacuation flights. We will make some calls in the morning and see.

Not to be dramatic but keep a good thought for us. This isn't fun.

Hurricane Watch

Well looks like Dean is picking up speed and tracking to cross south of Cayman Monday morning. Katie and I went to the supermarket this morning to get a full load of groceries for our hurricane kit. This afternoon it is over to the hardware store for nails and the home center for some tarps and additional plastic tubs for storage. The mood here has definitely changed in the last 24 hours and you could tell at the supermarket they were putting in the front the big hurricane items like water and canned goods. No price gouging yet so we were lucky. We also gassed up the car and will fill up our gasoline can for the generator.

Several evacuation charters are already being lined up but the college really doesn't have a plan in place. Katie and I are still trying to determine where the safest place to ride it out is, at our new home which is about a mile from the water or to the college which is about three miles in. It is more about what is on higher ground not where is closer to the water.

Will update tonight on our status.

Visit from Leader of Govt Business and Storm Watch

By Scott:

This evening the Leader of Government Business, the honorable Kurt Tibbetts, the Caymanian version of the Prime Minister, was a guest lecturer in our Business Management course. After two cancellations we were beginning to think he was not ever going to come but this evening we got confirmation around 7 p.m. that he would be at the college for the 7:50 class. He arrived driving his own vehicle and it was a stark reminder that on an Island with only 40,000 people even the highest elected government official is accessible.

I was already in a suit from a presentation earlier in the day to Kiwanis so there was no need to run home and get more formal clothes. Interestingly the Leader was in a short sleeve polo style shirt as was the instructor Joey Ebanks who is the manager of the huge turtle farm and very well connected politically (hence his ability to get the LOGB out as a guest lecturer). I still struggle with the dress code here. I want to show respect but at the same time when you are the only person in a suit you stick out like a sore thumb. The lesson of tonight is ask ahead of time and if the speaker is in short sleeves then I come in a sport coat and shirt with no tie, formal enough to show respect but not so formal as to stick out. The lecture and a question and answer session which followed lasted over two hours and went well. I had a chance to talk with the LOGB after the session and thank him for coming to ICCI and speaking with our students. We are hopeful that this is one of many new positive events happening to increase ICCI's profile and stature over the course of the next several weeks.

The other big news here is the changing path of Tropical Storm soon to be Hurricane Dean. The storm now looks like it will enter the Western Caribbean late next week as a category three or even category four hurricane and pass somewhere south of Cayman. That in and of itself will cause problems and the closer to Grand Cayman it is, the worse things will be. Tomorrow Katie and I are going to the store and buying several days worth of canned goods to fill out our hurricane kit. Hurricane fever hasn't quite hit yet but it will by the weekend if the forecast shows it is headed this way and we want to stock up before the shelves get emptied out.

Not looking forward to nailing up the wood over windows and riding out a storm but if that is to be then it is to be. Everyone tells us you really cant know what to expect until you actually go through it. Hopefully we wont have to learn.

Tracking the first big storm of the hurricane season

All the news here is on Tropical Storm Dean. The first real storm of Hurricane season 2007. From now to the end of October every storm will be watched carefully. We expect to see some part of it by the weekend and whether that will be the full storm or just some of the bands from it remains to be seen. It is strange watching the tracking reports and checking every couple of hours to see if the storm has turned etc. Right now it looks like it will move off toward the Bahamas and all we will get is a lot of rain. Either way we have our Hurricane kit up and ready. To follow the action check out the National Hurricane Center Web page at http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/index.shtml.

I attended a luncheon on hurricane preparedness last week and today made a presentation to the Cayman Islands Insurance Association and all the talk was about this storm. It is really a different mindset down here with everyone going about their normal lives but constantly checking the weather reports. All of the radio stations have hourly updates. I guess that for the next two months we just have to keep one eye on the weather as a fact of life. The downside of living in a tropical island.

New Place

By Scott:

After a long afternoon and evening of cleaning and unpacking we are all moved in to our new place. After making due in a small apartment for a year in Fort Worth and then an even smaller apartment at the college this place feels like a castle.

The master bedroom is on the second floor at the top of the stairs and has a a full bath attached. It is almost as big as our college apartment was. Across a small walkway is a guest room that overlooks the living room downstairs. You enter the condo through the living room then into a dining area before you get to the kitchen. As for that kitchen it is huge and Katie is very excited about the opportunity to ply her cooking magic in a full kitchen. There is even a second guestroom behind the kitchen and down stairs bathroom that we will use for storage or for long term guests. We have more space than we know what to do with for the first time in our marriage. Katie will post pictures and give virtual tour soon.

Outside a huge storm is blowing through. I don't even want to think about what must be happening back at the college apartment with the leak. We left out the coolers and sheets so hopefully tomorrow we wont find too much of a mess. We did leave our bikes at the apartment and intend to tag team bike them over here tomorrow, Katie in the morning when we have to go open the college up for a seminar class meeting early and me in the afternoon when Katie has a session with her students. Meanwhile no leak or flood issues here.

Our new physical address is either 2 Eggret Walk Red Bay Grand Cayman (which is the address on our lease) or 24 Princess Way, Red Bay, Grand Cayman according to our electric bill. Physical addresses are subject to lots of interpretations down here. No postage comes to your physical address so each company just sort of operates on its own with no consistency. Our mail will still be the Savannah post office that we gave out since its still closer to go there than it is to go to the airport post office which is the next closest. So just keep using the Grand Cayman KY 1-1500, Cayman Islands mailing address. We never did get a box from my mother but have gotten letters so those at least get to us in good shape.

The freedom of having a car and now our own place away from the college is really exhilarating. I think that if we had gotten a car when we first got here we might not have been so anxious to move away from the college but the living there and feeling trapped there because we had no vehicle was overwhelming. The other big thing surprisingly was not having a refrigerator or microwave in the apartment. Every meal we had to walk into the college and get things or if we wanted to watch a movie with popcorn walk in to pop it. That gets old quick and pushed us to move out much sooner as we had really planned to stay rent free in the apartment until December.