had sent me a note asking if Irma is going to cause me problems.  The short answer is I hope not.

We are in the Jacksonville, FL area.  If you look at the encircled area on the map below that tells a good bit of the story.  If you look really closely just to the left of the Cat-3 symbol and just above the white line there is a red dot and just below and slightly to the left is a blue dot.  I work at the red dot and live at the blue dot.  Last year during hurricane Matthew I took a couple days off to ride it out.  We just had a lot of rain and some wind, but not as bad as I feared.  We plan to do the same this year on Monday.

The forecast I saw last night for this area was 6-12" of rain and winds up to 60 mph.  But that was pretty general over a large area.  The wind drops significantly as you go inland and my house is only ten years old in a new subdivision with buried utilities so we are in pretty good shape.  Our house is also a ranch and the garage mostly faces the west.

Being the optimist I am last year's hurricane can have a silver lining for this one by pruning a lot of the trees that were blown over and caused power problems.  This area of Florida rarely gets a direct hit from hurricanes so it had been a long while and there were a lot trees that should have been culled.

If you don't hear from me on Tuesday of next week then look for flares in my area.  If you don't hear from me by Thursday Wednesday then send in the search dogs.