It’s a beautiful balmy night in Boca Raton. No one would ever suspect that there’s a killer storm lurking just a couple hundred miles off shore. In fact, I’m not sure that even I believe it.

I’m starting to think that this is an elaborate joint conspiracy by the Plywood Manufacturers of America, and the Association of Concrete Fasteners. They knew, after years of “the boy who cried wolf syndrome,” that after Charley’s abrupt right turn, after evacuating Tampa, and sending everyone to Orlando, after which they were hit there instead, that people will disbelieve any track projection, and that they could get everyone on the Sunshine State to purchase window-protection accoutrements by simply pretending that there was a storm out there.

To paraphrase Homer Simpson, here I am, sitting in a motel with my house boarded up, like a sucker.