For those who traveled to Hong Kong for the 2008 Olympic equestrian events, August came in like a lion and is roaring out like a starving pride of beasts. An August 6 typhoon ushered in many people’s arrival, and a real monster of a storm is ushering us out — or, more accurately, preventing us from leaving.

As I write this, Typhoon Nuri is a T9 on the typhoon scale — that’s 9 out of a scale of 10, meaning that we’re a baby step away from being a full-fledged hurricane, and probably will be so in a few hours when Nuri makes landfall smack-dab over Hong Kong