Here I sit in Bradenton, Florida, the Gateway to Armageddon.

In about 24 hours a Category 17 hurricane will huff and puff and blow my house in.

I hope that’s hyperbole!

It’s gotten so that I have been watching our local weather broadcast more than MSNBC’s coverage of Trump and Russia. Somehow, approaching doom of any sort becomes addictive.

Eileen and I were next door putting up shutters for my neighbor/friend and we didn’t have our phones. We came back from shutter installation to find ten voice messages and an equal amount of texts. It’s getting too much to comfort our friends and family.

We say the right things to put them at ease but the reality is we are scared shit.

You’d be a moron if you weren’t.

Now, I think we’ll be safe and, hopefully, the only things we lose will be property. I don’t think we will have flooding as our area has not even been coded. We were told not to evacuate as, because we are above  the flood plain, we would not be eligible for a shelter.  Of course, these things can all be re-defined after a disaster like Irma seems to promise.

Other good news in our favor is that our home is built to the new Florida building code which requires concrete block construction as opposed to a wood frame. We should be safe from the severe winds of Irma. But, when you spend the last two days putting up metal shutters on all your windows, you begin to see the point of what we are hearing from our weather broadcasts.

Our plan is to hunker down and prepare a safe room. Stock it with food and water and hope we are over-prepared and over-reacting.

I truly believe this will not be the last entry in the Newell Post. But I’m not sure that is a comfort to you?