Alacrity

Personally, the most heartbreaking part of this whole Ivan thing is that a lot of the pictures in the news of destroyed houses (like this) are from Cape San Blas, where my family goes every 4th of July. That's my beach that got destroyed! /pout

(My family and house survived, so I have to fall back on more superficial tragedies to connect to this story.)

PS: CNN had this to say about our old beach: "Cartographers will need to redraw maps of Gulf Shores, officials said, because waves swallowed as much as a half-mile to a mile of the coastline." Wow, that's one heck of a storm.