You're forgiven. Alex really cranked up after it left the Outer Banks, and went the furthest north of any Cat 3 hurricane.
I just checked the archives, it looked pretty impressive after heading out to sea. I will have to pay more attention next time (once they become fish storms, I usually stop watching). ;)
Outflow on Charley looks very nice now, I agree that he is probably closing in on Cat 3 at this point. It will be interesting to see how much he interracts with Cuba.
http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/breadcrumb.cgi?call=nhcr&geo=http://weather.net-waves.com/gulfsat.geo&start=12