Why We're Sure Hurricane Ike Is Coming Here

You know what hurricane weeks are -- the days when Cones of Probablility cover everywhere from Miami to Corpus, but always seem to be pointed right at us.

Hurricane Ike is the latest, after we held our breath over Edouard and Gustav. (How do you get from classy names like Edouard and Gustav to "Ike"?)

By this point of the year, everyone on the Gulf Coast is damn tired of waiting out hurricanes. The latest models seem (and we say "seem" in the sense of a slim reed that we're desperately hanging on to) to indicate that Ike's likely landing zone is inching south of us.

But, unfortunately, there is one key and utterly dispositive piece of evidence which all but confirms Ike is headed right up the Ship Channel.

That piece of evidence?

A little note from the U.S. Small Business Administration informing my wife and I that we have finally paid off the loan we took out to recover from Tropical Storm Allison.

As we wrote about at the time, Allison flooded us out completely. More than a year later, FEMA bought our ruined house and bulldozed it.

After two temporary rental residences, we've been in a house for almost four years.

We figured we'd get hit with a hurricane the first season after we moved in. But obviously the key factor would be the official, formal end of the last piece of real or psychic debt forced on us by Allison.

And with the receipt of the SBA letter, the God of Hurricanes is obviously setting us up for his enjoyment.

In other words, start stocking up on water and batteries, Houston.

-- Richard Connelly