I Will Survive
We survived the hurricane! Thank God! :) My luck with hurricanes thankfully continues. *knock on wood* Though reading the news it seems like it was luck all around that it wasn't worse (for us anyway) than it could have been.
By Saturday night, I was calmer than I'd been - drinking sangria probably helped. I still could barely sleep but I felt better on Sunday and I was starting to make my peace with us riding out the storm at home. Of course, that's when Jean texts me. She asked when we were coming. That surprised me because as far as I knew Mike hadn't changed his mind about staying home. I asked him about it and he said he had no idea which is right when she called him.
She basically did everything she could to get him to come over, including guilting him about making his mother worry. A lot of times when she does that it annoys me. Mike's a bit of a pushover at times and laid back and tries to avoid confrontation so usually when she nags him about things he'll give in just to get her to stop or because he doesn't really care either way.
He didn't give in but he told her that as long as wherever he was had beer he really didn't care where he waited out the storm. So he said the decision was 100% mine. He does that a lot. When we were deciding to move, he said the final decision was mine. He's basically said I have the final word on whether we have kids or not. While having that kind of say so can be kind of nice, I'm not one who makes decisions very easily, so it annoys me a little when he does that.
I had no idea what I wanted to do. I thought about it for ages but knew a decision had to be made soon before the weather worsened. Finally, I told him I couldn't decide by myself and he had to give me something. He said that he wasn't scared about the storm at all and part of him would like to stay at home. But he said another part of him knew that I would sit there and worry all night about whether we should have gone over there. I laughed and said I'd probably still worry even if we did go over there, but I said we should go. So we packed up as quickly as we could. We unplugged most of the electronics and turned off the A/C and left.
I felt a little better when we got to the house because they had boarded up the front windows. Unfortunately, when we got inside I saw that most of the rest of the windows were completely uncovered including the window in the room we were supposed to sleep in. My worry increased when I went online and we started watching more hurricane coverage. There was a Senator being interviewed and he said the wind didn't really concern him much, but it was the potential storm surge. On Twitter, people were posting pictures of areas in Tampa at the beach where the water had completely receded. They said when it came back it could be like a tsunami. I saw The Impossible and the thought of that freaked me out for the rest of the day.
While I was freaked out, Mike was the complete opposite. He was not kidding when he said he wasn't scared at all. He was having fun with it. He loves the rain and he said he would be outside if he could and he was excited. On Saturday he had me take a picture of him with two cases of beer in hand while he was wearing a life jacket and posted on Facebook that it was his preparation for the storm. On Sunday, he changed his Facebook profile picture to a shot of Bill Paxton from Twister and his cover photo to a tornado from the movie. I suggested that maybe a perfect job for him would be as one of those crazy hurricane chasers.
As the night wore on I got less and less panicked. The lights only flickered and the electricity turned off a couple of times very briefly. The news got a bit more encouraging. The hurricane was moving away from the gulf so that decreased the potential storm surge significantly. Plus, by the time it got to our area, it was "just" a category one storm. As much as I had been dreading it and as much as Mike had been looking forward to it, we both slept through the "worst" of it - though that made sense since the highest winds didn't really start until 2AM.
When I woke up, my phone wasn't working properly. My mom said she had called me and Mike a couple of times and we didn't get any calls and we couldn't make any. We had to turn them off to get them working. I wasn't sure if we could use the water but forgot and accidentally started to brush my teeth with water from the sink and then once I started watching tv I saw there was a boil water advisory for the east part of my county because a tree fell on a water main, but I wasn't sure if we were in the east or not. When we went outside, there were a lot of branches and leaves all over the back. We helped them clean up and then went home.
We also had very minimal damage at our house, just some leaves and a few branches. It's a good thing that the storm was not worse because Mike's idea to put cardboard on some of the windows wasn't a great idea. All of the cardboard was on the ground in a wet clump and the wind wasn't even as bad as it could have been.
A neighbor came over and she said that she had stayed through the storm and other than the lights flickering a couple of times, we didn't lose power. That was something that Jean mentioned, and I'd read about on Pinterest, that the closer you live to a hospital the faster your power comes back after an outage. We didn't live directly next to a hospital, but we're about five minutes away from one - plus the electric company is across the street.
I was still a little frustrated for the rest of the day for a couple of reasons. I was worried about the boiled water advisory and wanted to know if it was for our area. I called several different places and they were either closed entirely for the day or closed by the time I called and I couldn't find out anything specific online. This morning, I finally got a hold of somebody and they said my area probably wasn't included in the advisory, but if I was close to any of the other areas it was probably better to be safe than sorry.
Also when we got home, I turned on the A/C but it didn't come back on. We already had issues with it a couple of months ago and I was worried that it died completely because it was off for so long. I couldn't get it to work all day. Then finally at night, I put it way down to about 70 to see if it might start working, but when I went to bed the temperature was still at 81. When I woke up though it was freezing and, I have no idea, but now it's working thankfully.
Ugh, and there's still at least a couple more months of hurricane season to go. Hopefully there will be no next time this year, but hopefully, if there is we'll be slightly better prepared.
Stacey
By Saturday night, I was calmer than I'd been - drinking sangria probably helped. I still could barely sleep but I felt better on Sunday and I was starting to make my peace with us riding out the storm at home. Of course, that's when Jean texts me. She asked when we were coming. That surprised me because as far as I knew Mike hadn't changed his mind about staying home. I asked him about it and he said he had no idea which is right when she called him.
She basically did everything she could to get him to come over, including guilting him about making his mother worry. A lot of times when she does that it annoys me. Mike's a bit of a pushover at times and laid back and tries to avoid confrontation so usually when she nags him about things he'll give in just to get her to stop or because he doesn't really care either way.
He didn't give in but he told her that as long as wherever he was had beer he really didn't care where he waited out the storm. So he said the decision was 100% mine. He does that a lot. When we were deciding to move, he said the final decision was mine. He's basically said I have the final word on whether we have kids or not. While having that kind of say so can be kind of nice, I'm not one who makes decisions very easily, so it annoys me a little when he does that.
I had no idea what I wanted to do. I thought about it for ages but knew a decision had to be made soon before the weather worsened. Finally, I told him I couldn't decide by myself and he had to give me something. He said that he wasn't scared about the storm at all and part of him would like to stay at home. But he said another part of him knew that I would sit there and worry all night about whether we should have gone over there. I laughed and said I'd probably still worry even if we did go over there, but I said we should go. So we packed up as quickly as we could. We unplugged most of the electronics and turned off the A/C and left.
I felt a little better when we got to the house because they had boarded up the front windows. Unfortunately, when we got inside I saw that most of the rest of the windows were completely uncovered including the window in the room we were supposed to sleep in. My worry increased when I went online and we started watching more hurricane coverage. There was a Senator being interviewed and he said the wind didn't really concern him much, but it was the potential storm surge. On Twitter, people were posting pictures of areas in Tampa at the beach where the water had completely receded. They said when it came back it could be like a tsunami. I saw The Impossible and the thought of that freaked me out for the rest of the day.
While I was freaked out, Mike was the complete opposite. He was not kidding when he said he wasn't scared at all. He was having fun with it. He loves the rain and he said he would be outside if he could and he was excited. On Saturday he had me take a picture of him with two cases of beer in hand while he was wearing a life jacket and posted on Facebook that it was his preparation for the storm. On Sunday, he changed his Facebook profile picture to a shot of Bill Paxton from Twister and his cover photo to a tornado from the movie. I suggested that maybe a perfect job for him would be as one of those crazy hurricane chasers.
As the night wore on I got less and less panicked. The lights only flickered and the electricity turned off a couple of times very briefly. The news got a bit more encouraging. The hurricane was moving away from the gulf so that decreased the potential storm surge significantly. Plus, by the time it got to our area, it was "just" a category one storm. As much as I had been dreading it and as much as Mike had been looking forward to it, we both slept through the "worst" of it - though that made sense since the highest winds didn't really start until 2AM.
When I woke up, my phone wasn't working properly. My mom said she had called me and Mike a couple of times and we didn't get any calls and we couldn't make any. We had to turn them off to get them working. I wasn't sure if we could use the water but forgot and accidentally started to brush my teeth with water from the sink and then once I started watching tv I saw there was a boil water advisory for the east part of my county because a tree fell on a water main, but I wasn't sure if we were in the east or not. When we went outside, there were a lot of branches and leaves all over the back. We helped them clean up and then went home.
We also had very minimal damage at our house, just some leaves and a few branches. It's a good thing that the storm was not worse because Mike's idea to put cardboard on some of the windows wasn't a great idea. All of the cardboard was on the ground in a wet clump and the wind wasn't even as bad as it could have been.
A neighbor came over and she said that she had stayed through the storm and other than the lights flickering a couple of times, we didn't lose power. That was something that Jean mentioned, and I'd read about on Pinterest, that the closer you live to a hospital the faster your power comes back after an outage. We didn't live directly next to a hospital, but we're about five minutes away from one - plus the electric company is across the street.
I was still a little frustrated for the rest of the day for a couple of reasons. I was worried about the boiled water advisory and wanted to know if it was for our area. I called several different places and they were either closed entirely for the day or closed by the time I called and I couldn't find out anything specific online. This morning, I finally got a hold of somebody and they said my area probably wasn't included in the advisory, but if I was close to any of the other areas it was probably better to be safe than sorry.
Also when we got home, I turned on the A/C but it didn't come back on. We already had issues with it a couple of months ago and I was worried that it died completely because it was off for so long. I couldn't get it to work all day. Then finally at night, I put it way down to about 70 to see if it might start working, but when I went to bed the temperature was still at 81. When I woke up though it was freezing and, I have no idea, but now it's working thankfully.
Ugh, and there's still at least a couple more months of hurricane season to go. Hopefully there will be no next time this year, but hopefully, if there is we'll be slightly better prepared.
Stacey