Rising Waters

He hadn't been watching all the hoopla on the news, so he was totally unaware of the devastation that was headed his way.
"I was just sitting there in the bathtub when it came toward me -- a wall of water," recalls Tupi the cat.
"Nothing like that has ever happened before. It was a nightmare."
If Tupi had been watching the news, the 24-hour hurricane Irene coverage, he would have been prepared. He would have stocked up on extra food and barricaded himself in with sand bags, ready for that day someone actually turned on the shower when he was in the tub.
Tupi has since found a place to barricade himself and a friend until the "shower" has passed.
I don't mean to make fun of anyone who weathered Hurricane Irene in the past 24 hours. I know that many people have lost power and some people in North Carolina died from falling trees or flash floods.
We laughed this morning at the CNN 24-hour coverage. My feeling is that the news people have watched one too many disaster movie and are always disappointed when it doesn't live up to the catastrophe.
One female reporter was standing on a berm in front of a street and said the water in the street was a foot high and rising. Then she stepped down into it and it actually just came up above her foot. Not "a foot" high, but "her foot" high. Then a car drove past and kind of waited for her to get out of the way so it could get through. Oops. Maybe she was exaggerating just a bit. It was all a little ridiculous.
The camera focused on a downed tree branch and crews working to remove it. What destruction! Then a jogger slowly ran past in the background. Okay, maybe things weren't so bad. The news programs were ridiculous, as if no one in the world had faced such devastation. Truthfully, to the media, if no one in New York has lived through it, then it hasn't ever happened.
I'm breathing a sigh of relief that New York dodged a hurricane bullet, and I'm hoping that the overreaction doesn't make people ignore the warnings next time a storm is on the way.
Mostly, though, I'm hoping Tupi the cat realizes the danger he puts himself in when he hops into that porcelain bathtub. There, the waters can rise at any time.