gone living

as i sit here in my hostel using the internet and wondering how much i'll read of neal stephenson's phonebook-sized the system of the world (luckily i'm reading the british edition, which has a much better cover, as is usually the case with british paperback books) today, while increasingly stronger and louder winds of cyclone monica batter our building from the outside, i thought i'd post some cyclone factoids for all of you:

1. cyclone monica is a tropical cyclone, which is the same thing as a hurricane.

2. according to the caption on this photo from yahoo news, it's now only a category 2 (Australian Scale) cyclone. (On the US hurricane scale, this would rank it as a "tropical storm").

3. all stores on my street in darwin (mitchell st) are closed, aside from the grocery store which is open. however, the liquor store attached to the grocery store is closed.

4. speaking of beer, the bar in my hostel is on the roof next to the swimming pool, and therefore closed. (the drawbacks of a pool bar... looks like it will be a dry cyclone party.)

5. this is not the headline i need to read before i've had coffee: "'Perfect cyclone' bears down on Australian city - Darwin, leveled by winds 32 years ago, lies in Monica's path." (from yahoo's frontpage, accompanied by a picture of a big ominious cloudy spiral). this then changed to "Cyclone threat eases in Australia" when i dug deeper for a more recent headline.

stay tuned to your favorite news sources for details about cyclone monica.