Hurricane Wilma

[1/31/06]
I meant to come back to this post and add everything at a later time.. and it got later and later.....

so I will just summarize:
The hurricane hit and the news had led us to believe it wouldn't be that bad. We weren't preprared. Here on the 14th floor, the winds were moving the giant glass balcony door like it was a kite and so I ran into the family room and grabbed the tv, hauled it into the bedroom where it was safe and plugged it in.. to the one channel we actually get. We hoped to see the satelitte images and find out where the hurricane actually was and how bad it was going to be. ........
Instead... this reported talked for 8 minutes about nonsense.... up until the point that winds grew too strong and the power went out.

At that point Carol went into the bathroom and looked at the bathtub, which was full of water, as we were told to do. To her surprise, the water was shaking back and forth like it was a full blown earthquake. By the time the walls started to shake really bad and I thought things could get ugly I knew Carol might panic and with no other idea in sight, light sleeper that I am, I pretented to sleep. If I, who wake up at any noise, was sleeping, perhaps it would keep her calm. She later said it had helped.

So... from then on... it sucked. No air conditioning. No running water or toilet because on the 14th floor you need electricity to power the water. The truck had no gas so we went to drive the car... but .... NO! The parking garage was blocked by a giant tree. Don't feel too bad for me... I got to miss a few days of work.
When I did go back to work, that sucked out the last of the gas and we spent the weekend riding rollerblades to the grocery store or anywhere we wanted to go. Carol said, in a way, it made her happy to spend the quality time. It is dumb that we, meaning humanity, need things like this to get back to essentials.
The power company said that it would be 3 weeks until the power would come back on. 3 weeks on 14 flights of stairs... no bathroom... except for the one on the FIRST FLOOR!!!!...... no air conditioning.. no stove... no microwave... no food... no place to get food...
On the bright side, I thought that with no power, I would be able to study Japanese, and Chinese, and read more and more like I had always wanted to... thought the candlelight reading wasn't so great.
But the power did come on after about a week and we were thankful.

A few floors in the building weren't so lucky. Walls and ceiling, glass doors and windows all came in. Car windows were smashed one car even had a portable building fall on it!

A crack went right up the the front side of our doorframe, but didn't make it to the inside of the frame. We were lucky.

Cars all around the parking lot had broken windows. Trees had fallen all over the streets. Our cars were both fine. We were lucky.

All in all, and in life in general, we were and are.... lucky.