Isaias

I’m sitting in my house awaiting the appearance of tropical storm Isaias (pronounced ees-ah-EE-ahs). Speaking of which, where did the name Isaias come from? Is it even a real name, or just a made-up word? I delved into that. Turns out, Isaias is the Spanish form of the Hebrew name Isaiah.

Why did the National Weather Service choose it? Have they run out of regular names? I bet they haven’t used ‘Igor’ for a storm but we could, and we wouldn’t need a pronunciation expert to tell us how to say it. Tropical Storm Igor: it even sounds malevolent.

I will probably have a roof leak. The last time we had a tropical storm come through my city was in 2018. Florence had been a destructive hurricane in the Carolinas but dissipated to a tropical storm when it got to central Virginia. But it was a strong storm; it blew a piece of vinyl off the north side of my north dormer. That caused the dormer to leak when the rain was heavy and the wind was blowing hard from the north. The dormer hasn’t leaked again, but tonight or tomorrow will be a test of that dormer.

And what happens when the dormer leaks? The water runs down inside the wall of the dormer and ultimately leaks through my ceiling. I have to put a bucket under it, but the ceiling is definitely screwed up.

You may be asking why haven’t I replaced that missing piece of vinyl. That’s a fair question, especially considering that I still have the vinyl—I recovered it from my front yard after the storm. I’m too old to be climbing on rooftops. And the workmen I have contacted about repairing it, and who promised to fix it, have never materialized. The thing about home repairmen is they will accept all the jobs they are offered, then they will pick and choose the easiest and best-paying jobs and blow off all the rest. You’ll never hear from them. It appears that if they can’t make $500 on a job, it’s not worth doing. And this is a 5 minute job, after the repairman gets on the roof. Stick the vinyl in place, put a couple of screws in it, and maybe some caulk. Done. Climb down the ladder, put the ladder on the truck, and accept payment.

A bigger concern is losing electricity tonight or tomorrow. I have food in the fridge and the freezer. Without power, the food will be off refrigeration and I’ll have no way to cook it. But I don’t keep enough food on hand to worry about throwing it out. I may lose a few dollars, but I have canned food on hand if it comes down to starvation—and it won’t. 

No, the real problem with having no power is having no TV and no Internet. I might be able to connect to the Web through my mobile phone, but there’s no guarantee. When I’ve lost power in previous storms, the cell towers were down, too. But not everyone’s cell service was out—only the company that I had my service with. Because that’s how my life works. When I can’t cook at home and I go to a burger joint to eat, I’m the guy in line behind the guy who orders 86 burgers to go. Yes, that really happened. (link)

So now it’s a late Monday evening and I’m just waiting for Isaias.

Just waiting.