Things, Stuff & Such

So, hurricane Wilma happened…

The night before the storm I finished putting up the storm shutters. We have nice aluminum shutters that bolt into frames over each window and door. They are easy to put up and I did it by myself in a couple of hours over two days (since there was not rush ’cause Wilma didn’t want to leave the Yucatan Peninsula for a few days).
So, Sunday night we are all buttoned up except for the sliders on the lani. I shut those around 2a.m. Monday morning when I finally went to bed. I didn’t sleep though. I knew what was coming. If Wilma kept it’s course I would hit Collier county directly. This would be the first direct hit the county took in over forty years. I never really got very nervous about hurricanes coming toward us before, but I was a bit unnerved by Wilma. I was able to calm down a bit when it looked like Wilma would hit south of us in Naples. This meant that there would be no storm surge which is what was really making me nervous.
At about 4:30a.m. Monday morning we were into it and the power went out. A minute later our new generator kicked in and the tv and fan came back on. My father had just had the generator installed and it was tested for the first time about a week before Wilma – great timing, huh? This thing has a five hundred gallon propane tank and can keep us powered for up to a week without a refill. Not everything can run off the generator. We had A/C and power to most of the rooms to run fans and tv’s and our fridge and mirowave. Not a bad setup. The generator, however, is very noisy and the noise is more pronounced when the other houses are dark. But it was not bad when you have the hurrican shutters up and 100+ mph winds blowing around the house. With the power went our cable tv and my internet connection, so I kept tabs on the storm on a small tv with rabbit-ear antennas. By around noon Wilma was past us an leaving the east coast for the ocean. I thought it was all over, so I ventured out the lani doors to see what had happened. The wind was still very strong and the rain was cold.

Every yard was full of brush and debris from trees. My first sign of the damage was two trees in our backyard neighbors yard were down – one was leaning on their roof at the corner of their house. The ground, of course, was saturated and I was walking in a few inches of water in our yard – our house is built up a few feet from the road. Our neighbor to the west had a bit of damage to their pool cage and were missing several roof shingles.

Turns our our damage was very minor – only a bit of soffit was blown away.

Here are some pictures of my neighborhood.

This is a video a friend from work took during the hurricane.