Not quite the long-awaited island post

Long story short: as a person on the upper east coast of the USA, I'm in the path of Irene. In fact it is forecasted to go right over my house later today. I had to leave the island early, as they evacuated all but four people who had already been through nor'easters on the island and had foul weather gear. My best friend has a phobia of tornadoes and is understandably nervous about this storm, so she'll be coming over later today for a hurricane party. We're supposed to only experience it as a tropical storm, not a bona fide hurricane, so there's no expectation of evacuation orders. I grow a bit tired of not having a way to cook in the event of a power failure, but Dad refuses to buy a cheapo grill, so whatever. Brother is already freaking out because he has a phobia of power failures because then he has nothing to do but think, and thinking is detrimental to his mental health. We're a strange combination of prepared and completely unprepared - I really do expect that nothing worse than a power outage will happen. It will be scary and then it will be over.

In better news, I actually uploaded pictures from this trip to the island. XD I did successfully complete the class, informal as it was, and can now return whenever I want to help the banding station. I can extract birds from the nets without supervision, and in fact I was the first person the teacher had ever let extract a bird on the first day of class. I'd have loved to stay longer, but a storm is a storm and we wouldn't have been able to keep the nets open anyway. Hopefully one day I will be able to afford to go back and do it all again.

( SO MANY PICTURES )