My poor wife will back me up I'm sure, but she is probably tired of it all. About three days ago, the Old Gringo decided that there was a good probability that a bit of a hurricane would be forming in the northwestern Caribbean. It happened, of course.
Now it is ambling through the southwestern Gulf of Mexico. It is a small, somewhat non-descript tropical storm named Don....the kind of a storm you might meet in a run down bar with warm beer and dirty rest-rooms. But on a night like this, you have to dance with the only storm in the room.
We have determined that three different fixings of the co-ordinates were not correct. We have also noted that the stated course and projected paths did not follow any guidance factors with which I am familiar. It is probable that the Old Gringo has been left out of the loop since Global Warming was created by George Bush and Cristobal Colon. They no longer send me the new guidance factors for tropical disturbances.
The Old Gringo's guidance factors range from the "tongue of surface low pressure"....(an old system)....to the "middle-level steering winds" notion (relatively new...50 years old)....with a little bit of the idea of the "blocking high pressure system"....(which is probably related to #2). There are five or six other things but to explain them would be even more boring for me than for the normal OROG, who really does have better things to do than to read about Old Indian Chants from the Tennessee Cherokees which either attract or repel hurricanes depending what is needed at the moment.
The deal is that the storm has had movement more to the west than has been anticipated by the NWS and even by private weather analysis services. That means it will make landfall further to the south on the extreme South Texas coast......or somewhere within 40 miles south of the Rio Grande's mouth to the Gulf to 30 miles to the north. The landfall can be...at this writing...anytime between 20:00 hours Friday to 06:00 hours on Saturday. It is hard to determine the forward speed, in that the hurricane hunter plane has estimated it to-day to be ranging from 9 miles per hour to as high as 17 miles per hour as of an hour ago.
In any regard, to make a long, long story mercifully short, we might be away from the computer for a bit. The first thing to do is to secure the persons and effects of my mother and father-in-law. That will be a wonderland, because my mother-in-law will only believe what she hears or sees on the television news. The television is usually wrong, of course, and is always about 2 to 5 hours behind in terms of the developments that can be readily gleaned from the computer. So...it will be fun for a little while.
Thanks for your time and interest. We shall advise if things are exceptionally boring or exciting....either way.
El Gringo Viejo
