Did You Miss Me?

Just like a bad rash, or that annoying brother-in-law who keeps showing up to borrow your tools and never returns them, I’m back! Did you miss me? I sure missed all of you!

I appreciate everybody’s patience while we’ve been offline for so long due to Hurricane Ian. Let me give you an update on our hurricane experience.

We had planned to go up to Alabama to visit our son Travis and his wife Geli, but then they came down with COVID even though they were both vaccinated and boosted. They were about over it when the hurricane became a threat, and we probably would have been safe going up there, but we didn’t want to take that chance. And at first, we didn’t think it was going to be that bad here. Boy, were we wrong!

After slamming into the Gulf Coast of Florida, the storm came northeast up the state, and the models kept showing it going north of us. Then the models changed and showed it coming south of us. And then, at the last minute, the hurricane decided to roll right over the top of us. We had a tremendous amount of rain on Tuesday and Wednesday, September 28 and 29, and when we went to bed Wednesday night, the weatherman said the worst of the storm would be hitting us about 5 AM Thursday morning. So we were up and prepared for it, but instead, we had a blue sky, and everything was calm. We didn’t realize it at first, but we were in the eye of the hurricane, and when its back wall hit us, it hit hard.

We lost the cable TV and Internet first, sometime mid-morning on Thursday, and cell phone service became very spotty. Then the power went out early in the afternoon. I’m not going to lie to you. It was a bit nerve-wracking sitting in a manufactured home in the middle of something like that. But we have hurricane-tiedowns, and polycarbonate storm panels on the windows, and additions have been built-on all around the place, so it is pretty sturdy. Even so, there was a time or two when we wondered if we would lose the roof.

When things finally calmed down and the storm blew out to sea, we were very pleased and considered ourselves lucky that we didn’t have one bit of damage at our place. The drainage canal next to our property was running to within about a foot of the top but did not overflow, even though we got 19 inches of rain here in less than 24 hours.

Unfortunately, some of our neighbors in our community of Edgewater and the adjacent town of New Smyrna Beach didn’t fare as well. Some subdivisions had waist-deep water in the streets, and many houses were flooded. Some folks lost everything.

Here in our little subdivision, there were some awnings down, and a couple of small metal storage sheds were destroyed, but all of the homes survived well.

Some of the roads and low-lying areas were flooded, and our fishing dock was underwater. But that’s the worst of it right here where we live.

Our 18-plus years as fulltime RVers, a lot of that time spent dry camping, prepared us well for what we had to face next. Fortunately, the water supply never went down, and it wasn’t oppressively hot. Our two little Honda generators purred right along for five days, keeping our refrigerators going and allowing us to run some box fans to move the air around. But we sure were happy to see the lights come back on late Monday afternoon, no question about that!

It was frustrating that when the power came back on, most of our neighbors had cable television and Internet again, but we didn’t. Phone service was still in and out for several days. Terry and I didn’t realize how connected and dependent we are on modern technology for everything from posting the blog to researching to keeping in contact with friends and family.

Finally, last Saturday morning, a contract worker for Spectrum Cable was here to figure out what was wrong. It didn’t take him long to discover that a cable was down in the thick brush between the property lines and the drainage canal. He said he was not allowed to go in there by company orders, and we would have to clear a path for him. He was from Texas and asked me if there were any alligators in there, and I told that here in Florida, anything bigger than a birdbath could well hold an alligator.

My neighbor Jessie Bolton, who has come to our rescue more times than I can count, came over and cut a path through the jungle-like brush so they could access the pole, and then on Sunday afternoon, another Spectrum worker came out to do the hookup. He was a local man from down in Melbourne, Florida, so he wasn’t too worried about alligators. I will say that the water moccasin we saw down there gave us all a fright, but it slithered away, much to my relief.

So, the only thing we have going on now is a huge pile of brush that Jesse and I hauled out to the street from the path we had to hack through to allow them to access the pole. Life is getting back to normal here, and we’re glad about that!

Thought For The Day – No one is in charge of your happiness but you.