The folks in northwest Florida got battered last year. With this week's sudden "one-two punch," a lot of my neighbors in south Louisiana are expressing worry that this year might be our turn.

We never evacuated before last year, when we headed for Mississsippi for Hurricane Ivan (which turned out to be a "false alarm," at least for our area). The trip was a nightmare, and my wife swears she'll never leave town again; I agree. We live on the Gentilly Ridge, one of the highest areas in town (actually above sea level, unlike most of the city!), so we won't be underwater, although wind damage and prolonged loss of electricity and other utilities is always a possibility.

I suppose the threat of these storms is just the price of living in a "tropical paradise" where there's no such thing as winter. You makes yer choices and takes yer chances.

gnu ~ no damage to the house, but lots of huge downed limbs in the yard, one of which destroyed our herb garden. We have four trees over 100 feet high, a pine and three pecan trees, and these big storms always break off bits and pieces of them. Pecans are very brittle trees, and drop limbs at the slightest provocation, but I've never seen such large chunks of tree fall into the yard, or so many of them.

I'm gonna have to buy a chain saw before the weekend, and put it to use all day Saturday and Sunday ~ in past years, I've been able to clean up using a bow saw (hand-operated pruning saw), but the limbs are thicker and more numerous than ever before, and I'm not as young as I used to be.