Still about 3000+ miles from Florida, but it has everyone at the Weather Channel going hysterical. This is as exciting for them as the first pitch of baseball season.
Yet for some strange reason this has fired my survivalist neighbor into a frenzy of preparations for Armageddon. He has already put his storm shutters down. For god sake’s, were on the Gulf Coast of Florida. An Atlantic 'cane has got to have the moves of Walter Payton to thread its way into the Gulf, not that it hasn’t happened before.
I notice his garage door lights are on, indicating more preparations to battling doomsday. Last year he built a sandbag machine as a hurricane survival device. I wonder, with the same anticipation as watching a Road Runner cartoon, what contraption he will come up with this year to fight Mother Nature with. Yesterday was the first clue after seeing the sparks of some kind of welding device fly out of the garage. I’m thinking that this is the Escape Rocket Pod Project, but my wife is holding out for the Anti-Hurricane Force Field System. She reasons that this is more of her liking since we can convince him to slip our house under the force field if we go halves his electric bill for the month.
My first vital step in case Alberto makes a threatening move to my humble abode is to take in the two plastic pink flamingos from my front lawn. I am still pretty good on beer, so I can cross off Item #2 on my checklist for now. 
Any other Dopers down these ways doing anything yet? I need a good hurricane party!
Tampa here. That TS … wait, it is still a Tropical Storm right?.. that storm can kiss my ass. People crack me up the way they panic and go out buying canned goods and water and batteries and stuff. People, these are things you should have anyway!! Geez.
I used to love watching the A-Team. Where they would have to start welding bed frames and refridgerators into battle tanks and death traps. I would get a kick out of watching your neighbor.
Where on the Gulf Coast are you?
Navarre Beach, between Pensacola and Fort Walton. We got smacked by Erin and Opal in 1995. You don’t get too many down by Tampa, do you? I know you get those killer lightning bolts though.
I do feel for you guys down there in Hurricane Country. I happened to be in Florida when Andrew was on his way. I left the day before he hit. I was supposed to leave the day he struck, but the relatives I was staying with sort of encouraged me to leave. “You’ve been here a week, and it’s been great, but we wouldn’t be heartbroken if you left right now,” they said. See, I was staying in West Palm, and at the time, it was looking like Andrew was going to make landfall at Lake Worth, only about 3 miles away. So, I left.
Thank Goddess Andrew changed course and my family was spared, but dang, that was scary!
[hijack]Hey Bluepony! I’d like to send email you sometime, but you don’t have the little email icon thingy, and I don’t know your email address![/hijack]
Central Florida here (Lakeland) and we don’t get too much in the way of hurricane damage here, either…but I work in a converted warehouse complex and we SHUT DOWN under threat of hurricane, so last year, Floyd made life very interesting for me…so Alberto, nice to meet you, the Atlantic is that-a-way…keep on truckin’
YEP!! Still the lightning capitol of the world!! Dangerous… Nice pretty light shows though.
Huricanes do not usually make it here for some reason. Alena was really bad. I think that was like 1986 or near then. I was 5 or 6 at the time. We lived in an apartment and didn’t take those “precautions” every is so paranoid about. Besides a couple uprooted trees and some missing ducks, everything turned out fine. 
We evacuated for Georges, even though nothing happened to damage our house. We put up plywood, tied everything down, even had the boat in the driveway tied to trees so it wouldn’t float away if something happened. When Floyd threatened, we were prepared, and had shutters installed, so instead of a day’s work it’s an hour’s. I’m just hoping that whatever hurricanes we have threaten around August 23rd (the day school starts) and stick around for a while…