thatperson's Journal

The sky is red right now, as the sun comes up.  

BUT... IT IS BEAUTIFUL OUTSIDE RIGHT NOW!  It's not humid.  Not hot.  Not anything but pleasant and calm.

I feel nervous and anxious.  Jittery.  Wired.  Jumpy.  

I couldn't sleep.  I got up when my roomie left for work at 5 am.  Last minute closing duties.  They have to secure the freezers, coolers, storage.  Pack what they can onto the waiting semi-trucks to take north.  They should be done around noonish.

Gah, I still need to get the patio furniture tied down, or brought inside, if I can find a space to shove it all.  The trashcan needs to be bungied to the fence or something.  I'm not bringing that nasty thing inside with me in case I am stuck here.

The landlord hasn't put wood over the windows yet...  they always think there is more time than there really is.  At least we don't have any trees really close - just across the street and down a ways.  We have 1 palm tree in the yard that didn't fall down with Katrina.  HArdly any trees anywhere since Katrina.  Nothing to slow the wind or storm surge down...

I need to fill some more jugs with water, in case I can't get out of here.  I should hurry and bake some bread loaves maybe, before the power goes out.  We have food, but I don't know if we have any propane.  GAH!  I can live on PB&J for a while, I'm not too picky when it's an emergency.

The casino....

It's crazy.

They wouldn't even turn the news on out in the dining room last night, because they didn't want to worry the customers.  You'd think they'd want to know the speed at which Gustav went from 3, to cat 4, to verging on 5.  To see how extremely LARGE it was growing, how it was sucking in the clouds and such around it.  Feeding and growing.  Like Katrina. 

We were checking the TV in the employee lounge to see if it had sucked in Hanna, but thankfully, she's staying a little ways off right now still.  God, could you imagine?  Has that ever happened before?  Where a major hurricane, sucked up a smaller one near it?  I see 2 more possible storm creation points have popped up behind Hanna, on the NHC site...

Sorry, I'm rambling and got sidetracked looking out the window at nothing...

They decided at midnight to shut down at 7 am.  At the time, Gustav was turning into a cat 5 storm.  I bet if they knew it was gonna weaken a little bit, they would have decided to stay open later.  It's gonna restrengthen again once it hits our bathwater like Gulf...

I can't believe our guests didn't want us to close either.  But then again, the PTB decided to loosen up the machines to loosey-goosey levels compared to usual to get people to stay...

Last night, we spent the night standing around being nervous.  Our casino sits on stilts over swampland in the mississippi sound.  The wind was already picking up a little (not enough to do any damage or anything, but enough to notice it wasn't still, like when we showed up).  Call it a stiff breeze, if you want.  Nothing unusual, but all of us have heightened nerves right now.  The smoking deck was packed full of people trying to get a cell signal to call family and friends, to let them know we all had to stay later than usual to clean up since graveyard wasn't coming in.  (hardly any signal around that building on a normal day, let alone a day when 5000 people are trying to call out to family near and far).

The only way into the casino was being shut down at 6 am this morning, turning it into an exit only road, with a detour away from the sound at the soonest possible street out (they are doing construction on the sewer/water mains, so most of the side streets are closed as it is.... ).

All the main arteries in/out of town, are now exit only.  No more getting into our town.  You can only leave.  Traffic was hellishly slow at midnight last night.  It took 45 minutes to just CROSS the 4 lanes of highway to get home.  ( I live 8 miles from work, one of the closest people...  Normally takes 16 minutes.)  My coworker that lives 30 miles away said it took her 2.5 HOURS to get home last night. 

Traffic trying to leave town, is at a standstill currently, at 6 am CST. 

How does that happen, when everyone is going in the same direction?

I don't know if we're going to be able to leave here.  My roomie is still at work for a few more hours, putting the last of the casino's inventory on a semi-truck that's heading up to Jackson.

The National Guard has been going door to door to all those in MEMA cottages and FEMA tailers or regular mobile homes and to those in low lying areas and enforcing their mandatory evac's. 

So far, we're not mandatory, or at least, I haven't heard that we are yet. 

We're gonna try to evac this afternoon, if possible.  We have 10 cars packing up and getting ready to heady to Panama City I think.  

I'll try to post an update later.