Anxious Days...

I’m almost back in that 9/11-type news obsession, watching Rita coverage.

And last night came the coverage of JetBlue flight 292 trying to land. In case you missed it, the plane’s forward landing gear malfunctioned; the wheels were turned sideways and couldn’t be moved.

So we watched this thing circling, and with my son there I wondered how to approach this. I should have turned it off, I know. I did try to make a lesson out of it though. So much of what he sees on TV is pretend, and we try to make that clear. But he kept saying, “I think it’s going to get smashed” and things like that. I explained that there were people on that plane who were very scared. Kids, grownups, all scared.

And the touchdown was amazing, simply amazing. We were all were jubilant when they landed safely. The front landing gear caught fire as the wheels were scraped off, but the apparatus didn’t collapse, and aside from a brief fire there was nothing scary.

***

I hope my family and friends have homes to return to when this hurricane is said and done. Thought for a while we might get to host Whit and his family. I was kind of excited, actually. But he found a hotel room in, uh, Kerrville if I recall. Jeez, he’ll probably still get a whopper of a storm there.

Dad rents a house on the river in Matagorda, and that place is likely to get hammered. On the plus side, it’s 14-15 feet up. But… 160mph winds can be too much for most any dwelling to withstand.

And his own house in Angleton, while solid enough to have gotten us through Alicia in ’83, doesn’t have boards on the windows. I gather that after doing everything they could to get the Matagorda house ready (and to stow his boat somewhere), they simply had no time to concentrate on the Angleton house.

My sister was very frank about how she looked at her house before leaving and wondered if it’d be the last time she saw it.

***

The projections (like this one) pretty much show the storm going straight over Brazoria County at this point.

***

It’s hard to even roll out the usual rundown of how I’m doing at this point. The summary:

Homework—not nearly as bad as I expected.

Running—stamina was good, but knees are badly sore.

***

Words escape me. I hope you and everyone important to you remain safe.