blowing in the wind

I really enjoyed the few hours the world was free of Facebook last week.

The platform does have its uses. And I take advantage of them myself. What does annoy me though is the amount of false information that runs wild on its digital Serengeti.

Our local pages are currently fretting about a hurricane that is going to flatten the Costalegre. Someone even put together a graphic that looks as if if was drawn by something just the other side of a Sharpie.

And looking out across the bay tonight, it is possible to imagine a storm is on the way. And it is. The wind whistling through my neighboring antenna is evidence of that.

Here is what we know from the good folks at the National Hurricane Center.

For the past several days, a disturbance has been swirling around in the Pacific a few hundred miles south of Mexico. It had all the potential to develop into some form of cyclonic activity (a depression, a tropical storm, or a hurricane). Today it did just that jumping from disturbance to depression to tropical storm in quick succession.

Meet Tropical Storm Pamela. Nice name that. Pamela.

But the people in our area are not very likely to meet her up close and personal. Tuesday morning Pamela will morph into a hurricane. But she will be well off shore from us. At least, according to the most-recent computer model.

This is the point where someone will pipe up with an appropriate "but that is what you said about Nora, and look at the destruction she left behind just a month ago." And the observation would be an apt one. With the exception of a wizard family in Cihuatlán who knew all of the details about what Nora would do, the rest of us were shocked at how destructive such a small hurricane could be when it was still miles away from us in the ocean.

That is fair warning. NOAA (the National Hurricane Center's parent) has also produced maps of when the winds associated with Pamela should show up here. If I am reading the map correctly, we should feel the outer rim of Pamela's winds around tea time tomorrow.

And, if we get the outer rim of Pamela's winds, we almost certainly will also get some of the rain that the hurricane will be dragging along. That means we should expect at least some inconvenience from rain in the streets.

While I was out on my evening walk gathering information for this weather update, I was a bit surprised to see how busy the town is on a Sunday night. September had been a bit of a tourist bust for local businesses. Not so tonight. Maybe the tourists have come to see if Pamela is going to deliver a show or not.

The proof will be in the blowing.