Not as bad as we feared

Here's an update for the family. The hurricane, so far, hasn't been as bad as we feared. Right now it's over Shreveport, but it's been downgraded to a tropical storm. The picture to the left shows the storm as of about an hour ago.

It rained heavy this morning, but it's only been spitting for the last couple of hours. In fact, it's not even raining right now. The wind is still pretty strong. We've seen worse.

Our biggest worry is that the storm will stall and dump a lot of rain on us. Weather.com shows that the storm is projected to move north of us through Arkansas by tomorrow evening. With some luck we won't even see a lot of rain out of this.

The only real problem we've had is a slow internet connection. People at work were complaining about that, too, this week, though it seems to be worse today. Ever since Katrina hit the high speed connections at work and at home have been slower than usual, with lots of "timeout" errors. Our home connection seems to be slower today than it was yesterday. I'm guessing that the extra people in the area, damaged telephone and data lines in the south of the state, and the bad weather are all to blame.

It's a bit too soon to say that the worst has passed us. The picture shows a cell heading for us (which seems to be hitting about now as the wind has picked up). We still have power, which means we still have air conditioning, and everyone is having a lazy day. As long as we have seen the worst of it, today may turn out to be the quiet, relaxing day we've needed since Katrina hit.