August 31st, 2023

Well, taadaa!  We made it through another hurricane.  This one, Idalia, we are being told, was very unusual in that it followed a path never before seen in  recorded weather history!  Wow!  Which means it also hit an area that has never had a hurricane before. At least not a direct hit.  Those poor folks :(  My heart goes out to them!

We had lots of wind and rain, flooding on the roads closest to the beach but otherwise, it's all good.  I've already picked up the deadfall in the yard.  3 garbage cans later...jobs done.    But I'm leaving most of the sandbags in place until the end of hurricane season - just in case.

So many lovely people have been checking in with us, to make sure we are ok. That is so thoughtful and considerate!! Just warms my heart.   But in talking with folks,  I think there is a little misunderstanding of how a hurricane works.  If I may do a small tutorial before I move on?

Think of a hurricane as a pinwheel.  Imagine each of the petals of the pinwheel has streamers attached to the tips.  When it spins around, obviously, the streamers reach way way way farther than the edges of the pinwheel right?  Ok.  Now imagine that pinwheel is 350 miles across.  That's roughly the size of the state of Colorado.  Now then, the center of that pinwheel made landfall in Cedar Key Florida which is more than 3 hours north  from us.  Only the streamers of the pinwheel lashed us.  The strongest part of the storm is the actual pinwheel.  Does that makes sense?

Good!  Now bear in mind that this pinwheel travels counterclockwise which means the top of the pinwheel (or north side) is pushing at things including water and the bottom of the pinwheel (or south side including us) is pulling water.   Which is why the backside of the hurricane can also be very damaging; Storm Surge!  The storm literally pulls the water onto shore.  Storm surge is often the worst part of the storm.  Meterologist sometimes refer to the backside of the hurricane as the "dirty side".  Dirty as in dirty tricks!

Hope that helped!

One of the hardest parts of getting through a "weather event" is the not knowing.  You don't know for sure where it's going to hit, you don't know for sure how bad it's going to be, if you are going to lose power, or be underwater, or have trees down, or house damage even!  And it's a lot of waiting. Waiting. Waiting.  I paced a lot.  Used up my nervous energy cleaning and organizing and doing things that didn't really need to be done.  Tim on the other hand is pretty relaxed about it.  His feeling is that there is nothing he can do to control it, so he is more focused on being prepared as much as possible and dealing with the rest afterwards.  He is so smart. Wish I could do that.

The sun is shining brightly today. At least for right now.  Weather predictions suggest rain later, but that's ok. I'm loving the sunshine right now.    It was still windy and rainy yesterday so mostly, I stayed inside and re-organized part of the pantry, cleaned bathrooms and made a coffeecake with brown butter icing.  I shouldn't brag on myself, but it tastes reallllly good.

And because we are always curious, instead of doing the noonwalk,  Tim and I headed out in the car to see what we could see.  I brought my camera of course.  At one point we assumed that we were between rain bands and headed down a boardwalk toward the beach only to have the sky, suddenly, open up and, needless to say, we were drenched!  But that's ok.  Once that band cleared, we continued and the pictures happened.    Even saw a couple of birds!

It was windy and rainy enough that the camera lens kept collecting wet sea air and moisture (which also means salt) so I had to keep cleaning the lense.  It was hard to get really good shots, but I did the best I could. Please bear that in mind:

I did have a teehee moment the day of the hurricane.  At one point I suddenly realized that last year, when Hurricane Ian came through, I was wearing the exact same clothes!  LOLOL  It seems that I have an official hurricane outfit!  What  a silly thing to remember.

Labour Day weekend is coming up!  Hope you have something wonderful planned!  I'll see you at some point next week!

Have fun and be safe ya'll.  Hugs all 'round.