There's A Storm Out There With My Name On It

It's a bit of a difficult thing having a serious weather event with your namesake. I wonder if anyone else - named Ivan, Irene, Andrew, or Hugo, for instance - has ever had any problems. On the one hand, you might feel some kind of kindred spirit with a storm with your name on it, and you might feel a bit like rooting it on somehow. On the other, when they end up causing so much damage and take lives, they're clearly unstoppable, deadly forces.

That being said, I'm happy to report that this year's Tropical Storm Bret didn't pack too big of a punch. It was downgraded to a tropical depression before it hit land over Mexico. In fact, I didn't even realize there was a storm named Bret this year until my grandmother pointed it out to me. The last Bret-related meteorological phenomenon that I was aware of was Hurricane Bret back in '99, which hit southern Texas and cost nobody their lives.

This brings up a curious point, though, because I thought the hurricane naming people tried not to repeat names, at least not as often as every six years. It turns out that everything is on track. When I Googled and did a little research today, I found out that there are actually six set lists of names which rotate every year. Particularly destructive storms have their names retired, but otherwise you will end up seeing the same names every six years. Thus, we're back up to the Arlene-Bret-Cindy-Dennis combo list, which will reappear in 2011.

I guess it's time to look up Dennis, my old Space Camp roommate, to see how he feels about all this.