Post-Hurricane - Sunday

I'm on a friend's computer with internet access. Yay! This will have to be short, though, out of consideration.

The hurricane winds were pretty scary from about midnight through 8 am but our house is incredibly solid. The walls didn't even creak. We lost a few metal siding things from the gutters but that appears to be it. We acquired a new wind turbine which we found only a foot away from the cars. We don't know where it came from since no one in the near vicinity lost one. We have a neighbor with a new trampoline, blown into the yard from who knows where.

I've got some great pictures whenever I can get them uploaded.

Our neighborhood is full of downed trees and one street is completely blocked. Most of the rest of the neighborhood is passable though. The first thing everyone did was go outside even before the rain stopped and start moving the branches out of the roads so vehicles could pass. We saw the university cops go through today on patrol and that made me happy.

We finished clearing our yard and driveway of debris today so we look all civilized now except for the downed tree in the yard and the enormous debris pile. Everyone has a debris pile though. We also found that the reason our tree in front fell was that it was partly hollow and contained bees. I took a picture of the honeycomb so I hope the pic turns out.

There's a satellite tower behind our house where the dish blew over and the tower is now bent with the dish facing the opposite direction.

The campus has power and we had dinner in my office break room last night, cooking food from our freezer in the toaster oven. As we lose cool in our fridge we'll slowly take food over there to keep in the office fridge. No one is sending us away when we're on campus so as long as we don't look like we're moving in, we figure it's cool.

I cooked scrambled eggs with chipolte cheddar and gingerbread pancakes this morning over a sterno can. It was too windy to use my soda can stove but I'd like to try that out sometime too.

For light, we have solar yard lamps that we take outside in the day and bring indoors at night. We also have chemical glow sticks. It's all much safer than candles. We have nice LED lanterns, too.

We have no screens for the doors but we rigged up some mosquito netting. Should any mosquitoes get inside despite our efforts we can rig them over the bed at night.

Dan isn't mocking any of my hurricane supply efforts any more.

Still no word on when the university will reopen but it obviously won't be Monday. I think they should give us most or all of the week because of the massive cleanup people have to do and because people who evacuated aren't even back. We need to have enough faculty, staff and students to make a reopening worthwhile and this is a university with over 30,000 students and over 6,000 faculty and staff.

There's a cool front coming soon so this should be the worst day in terms of having no a/c. It's not so bad yet because there's a breeze and it's been overcast much of the day.

In sum, we're doing just fine.

Oh, and Cadbury was a trooper. I put him in his carrier and put him in the closet during the worst of the storm and he made no fuss even though he was cooped up in there for hours. The cat was a little weirded out by everything but the pets did really well.

Okay, I really should get off this guy's computer and let him get back to whatever he was doing. I'll post again whenever I can.