Our Hurricane Story

Being of the strange and often time maligned breed of Native Floridian (yeah I get it... all the weird junk goes down in Florida), Irma was about the 4th or 5th hurricane I have experienced that I can remember clearly. Our story is not extreme. We did not lose life, property we could not survive without or even, miraculously, power. For that we are very much thankful. We helped neighbors and family, shared our generator with someone in need and cleaned up the after math quickly. 

But it was still scary as hell and anxiety was running high in the home in the wee hours of the morning as Irma's eye crashed directly onto our home.

Before all that happens though... there is a whole lot of prepping and waiting. And rock painting.

And game playing.

And Lego building.

And even working. Why is he smiling while he works? Because he's just that kinda guy. 

We had my mom, sister and her boyfriend over to weather the storm. While I am a planner (water bottles, bread, cupcakes baked, eggs boiled, tubs filled with water, generator filled with gas), my mom is a techie planner (weather radio, battery power charger, cell phone power banks, rechargeable batteries), so together pretty much all the bases were covered.

And then we waited some more.

And waited. And snacked (can I tell you how many peanut M&Ms were consumed? Maybe a good two pounds).

And that beautiful thing called family time occurred. 

After a sleepless night of wind howling, the eerie blue green flash of transformers exploding with loud pops and bangs and the thumps of heavy objects toppling to the ground... we awoke to the tail end of Irma still trashing the trees and the sight of shingles scattered everywhere, fencing tossed like so many dice and our playset (and the neighbor's) in shambles.

We started tearing it down for firewood, piece by piece, and helped our neighbor pick up his fencing.

The retention pond in the backyard is now a nice sized lake and Savanna has been using it to go "fishing" in.

We drove around our town and saw many power lines down, many a roof caved in by massive oaks and damage everywhere. Over 80% of the town is without electricity. We won't have school for the rest of the week. But we will have some time together. 

Thank you for all the well wishes and prayers and messages that you were simply thinking of me and my family. It truly means the world to me. To know someone cares is the best gift. We are thankful we have lost so very little and were able to come out of the other side whole and intact. Thankfully most of the time hurricane season is nothing to worry about, but it is just a fact of life where I live and a risk that is always present. 

Now... I am hoping Jose decides to curve out in the Atlantic. Because I am done trying to reason with the hurricane season.