Am I Alive???

Having finally caught up on both Oz books and Star Trek Adventures modules, I don't have any content queued up for today (Friday) as I write this today (Wednesday).

If you have followed the news at all, you will know that Hurricane Milton is about to hit (has just hit) the Tampa Bay area, where I have the dubious honor to reside. We haven't evacuated for a hurricane since Irma in 2017, but for reasons that seemed good at the time, my wife and kids decided to go up to Columbia to hang with friends while schools were closed; meanwhile, I would stay here to prep the house and ride out the storm.

Once they left Monday morning and it became increasingly clear the storm was headed directly our way, we began to wonder if this was the right call. We don't have, say, storm shutters or a generator! So as I write this Wednesday morning, I am soon to head out to the house of some friends who live nearby and do indeed have both of those things.

Milton will hit tonight. Recent trends have it probably making impact to the south, which is good, because the original estimated track took it basically right over where we live!

So what will happen? Well, by the time you read this, you will know, but as I sit here writing it, I have no idea. Hopefully my house is still intact.

And hopefully so am I.

EDIT AT 9:20 AM ON FRIDAY: I am alive, and my house is intact.

I Hurricane I

This week marked our third hurricane since moving to the Tampa area—and our third "I" hurricane to boot: Irma (2017), Ian (2022), and now Idalia. Whereas we had many days leading up to Ian last year, Idalia felt like it popped up out of nowhere. The first I really knew of it was when my wife told me to do the weekly shopping Saturday, not Sunday. Whereas with Ian we knew school was cancelled for the whole week going into the weekend with an expected Tuesday landfall, Idalia had an expected Tuesday night landfall, but it wasn't until Monday afternoon that either the local schools or my university called off for Tuesday.

Monday was actually my first day of classes; the university spent the weekend and Monday morning beating the "no operational changes at this time" drum, which was annoying because we all knew something was coming. When I went over the schedule with my two morning classes, I was like, "Something about this will change, I will not see you Wednesday, but I don't know what." Finally around noon they called Tuesday and Wednesday off, so when I had my Monday afternoon classes, I had already adjusted the course schedule to make our next meeting Friday.

Son One helps put deck furniture in the shed.

We did our prep Tuesday morning (though I still kept a dentist appointment I had made), which was pretty low key: tie stuff down or move it to safe locations, make sure devices were charged and that we had ice in the event of a power outage. But even as we did all this and the rains began, across the course of the day it became clear the track was moving further and further west and we would have little to fear. (Storm surge closer to the coast, of course, but we are pretty far inland for that.) When we went to bed Tuesday night, it was raining decently hard, but there was no sign of even tropical storm–force winds, much less hurricane ones.

So Wednesday was a pretty chill day at home with my wife and the kids; the public schools resumed Thursday, and UT reopened at noon yesterday, meaning I will get my second day of class today, but if you have a Tuesday/Thursday morning class, you will go the whole first week without meeting your students!

Hurricane II: The Revenge

Okay, this is a bit late! But if you follow the news, you will know a big hurricane recently came our way in Tampa, Florida. Hurricane Ian was actually our second; months after we first moved here, we experienced Hurricane Irma.

We evacuated for Irma, staying with our friends Jared and Angela in Columbia, South Carolina, but in the end, it had been kind of unnecessary. We live fairly far inland, in a suburb of Tampa. The advice they give is "run from the water, hide from the wind." That is to say, if you don't live in a flood zone, your best bet is to stay at your home, and just be ready for wind, moving to a safe interior room if you get hit by hurricane-force gusts.

Evacuating for Irma not only turned out be totally unnecessary, but kind of risky. When we came back, there was no way to get off the interstate once we got on it for much of Georgia:

The drive home was much less smooth: for the last forty miles of I-95 S in Georgia, every exit was barricaded by the state highway patrol, sometimes supplemented by the armed forces! As far as I could tell, there was no advance warning of this. Thankfully we'd gassed up in Augusta despite having over half a tank, or we might have been in some trouble. We later found out that the entire county was basically without power, so they just kept all the returning refugees on the interstates.

If I hadn't had the forethought to gas up in Augusta, we could have been stranded on the side of I-95! By the time we got back, it was clear our power had been out, but it was not actually out anymore, and our home was fine.

So we decided to not evacuate this time. Or rather, really, Hayley and I never even talk about evacuating at all; we just set to doing what we needed to do. We don't have storm shutters or anything, so mostly that came down to clearing the yard of the kind of stuff that could be hazardous debris, stockpiling canned goods in case we lost power, filling the tub with water for flushing the toilets, preparing a cooler, and so on.

pre-Ian gummy making

Ian was incoming over the weekend and due to arrive around the evening of the Tuesday the 27th; pretty quickly, the public schools called off Monday through Thursday because some of them get used as shelters. I actually woke up on the Saturday before horrendously sick. Incredibly achy and tired, so I could do little other than lie on the couch or in bed as Hayley did a lot of the prep. I was still pretty bad Sunday, but I was due to have student conferences on Monday, so I powered through a bunch of papers Sunday evening, only for UT to call the whole week of school off at 7:30pm Sunday. UT usually doesn't make calls that quickly in my experience, but it was certainly handy. Most of our students are from out of state, and so many of them were flying back home, so there was no way to hold class on Monday. UT's dorms are in mandatory evacuation zones A and B, both of which the county called, so students couldn't remain on campus once evacuations started.

I did feel a bit better by Monday, and began to pitch in, but it was clear by that point that the hurricane wouldn't really arrive until Wednesday. And as everyone now knows, by Wednesday morning, it was clear that the hurricane's track was turning steadily east, meaning it would make landfall nowhere near Tampa, and thus any wind impact on us would be pretty minimal.

So our Wednesday was pretty chill. I made a meal I had planned as a dinner for lunch, in case we lost power—but this turned out to be unneeded, as we never did, though there were a number of flickers off and on across the course of the late afternoon and evening. We had a family movie viewing (The LEGO Movie, which I had never seen) in the afternoon, which isn't something we've done very much, so again that was nice. The Internet went out in the evening, but other than that there was some strong-ish wind and consistent but rarely heavy rain.

When we woke up Thursday, the power was still on and the Internet still out. Our main impact was that a number of the screens on our pool enclosure tore, and the pool had a bunch of leaves in it. I, like an idiot, had forgotten to turn off the pool pump's automatic timer, so the leaves jammed up the pump and it lost prime, but I was able to fix it. And that was it! We had a pretty lazy couple of days of slowly putting back everything we had locked up. Lots of our neighbors had lots of branches in their yards, but we don't really have any trees, so that wasn't much of an issue for us. Of course we were lucky—south of us you had trees falling on houses and massive flooding. One of my students commutes from Anna Maria Island, and wasn't able to make it to class for a week.

We watched some friends' kid (our older son's best buddy from pre-K) on Saturday, since they had a fence come down in the storm and needed to make repairs.

We didn't get Internet back until Tuesday the 4th, almost a week since it went out! It's kind of understandable, but it was very frustrating because the damage to our area was so minimal, and calling Spectrum support was useless, as they wouldn't even give us estimates. In 2022, I basically can't do any course prep even without being online, so on Saturday, I had to go to a Panera in order to edit my syllabus and prep my Blackboard site and organize lesson plans and e-mail my students about what to do. Meanwhile, back at home, Hayley and I were burning through data on our phones!

How Do You Batten Down the Hatches When You Don't Have Any Hatches? (and what does "batten" mean anyway?)

When you move, people always ask you how the old place is versus the new place, and so you find yourself (or at least I do) developing some consistent responses. "I won't miss Connecticut winters but I will miss Connecticut fall" is something I've found myself saying far too often. Sometimes a follow-up will engender that I will miss snow days, and then me fumbling into the idea that Florida might have "hurricane days," haha.

Well, it turns out it does. My first hurricane turned out to be (Wikipedia informs me) the most intense Atlantic hurricane to strike the United States since 2005, and the first major hurricane to make landfall in Florida since 2005. Well, whoops.

Initial projections had Hurricane Irma going up the east coast of Florida, whereas we're on the gulf coast, so we decided to hunker down. I first really started taking its intensity seriously last Wednesday, when the University of Tampa cancelled classes for Thursday through Monday. Less, I think, because they were convinced UT was going to be a disaster zone, and more because the students were already bailing. Each of my three sections (of 17-22 students) was already missing four or so students on Wednesday, as worried parents pulled their children out of the state and back home to Chicago or wherever, and conversations with my students indicated the rest of them were on their way out soon. (At least three-quarters of my students are not from Florida.) By Friday there probably wouldn't be enough people left to make viable class sessions.

I attempted to busy myself with hurricane prep, but mostly I just ended up busying myself with reading articles on Reddit and elsewhere about my imminent demise. We tried to keep our ears to the ground and figure out what locals were doing, though, and most didn't seem to be freaking out, so we figured out where our local pet-friendly shelter was, and bought some canned goods (all that was left was canned French onion soup and canned lobster chowder... I'm sure they're great) and bottled water (I know we could just bottle our tap water... but we actually don't have any large bottles!). Hillsborough County has five pre-set evacuation zones based on flood risk, and our house wasn't in any of them, so wind was the primary thing we had to worry about. We moved stuff way from windows (easy because much of our possessions are still boxed), cleared our backyard of loose objects, but we couldn't board up our windows-- all the plywood was sold out at all the stores!

We had confirmed early on with our friends Jared and Angela in Columbia, South Carolina, that we could head up there if we needed refuge, and as the projected track of Irma shifted west we began considering it more and more. Finally, on Saturday morning (about 36 hours pre-Irma), with the eye track now running right through our town, we decided to get out. Sheltering in an interior room seemed a lot less fun if our windows had a good chance of being blown out! All our out-of-state friends and family seemed quite relieved at the decision. Our cats, though, were less than thrilled. (One poops about an hour into any extended car trip... it's great. Especially when you forgot to pack plastic bags.)

Whenever some said "Irmageddon," I thought
of the superhero of that name from Top 10.

We weren't the only people to book it out on Saturday; the interstates were pretty busy, though not really the gridlock that some media reports had made them sound. Taking I-4 east out of Tampa towards Orlando, we noted that signs had been activated that allowed driving on the median... but no one actually was, so we held off.

Eventually we ended up in a standstill, and then a few cars zipped by us on the shoulder, we decided we'd follow them, zooming past the stopped cars. This made a few of the drivers of parked cars very, very angry-- one gave us the finger, another did the thing where you pull halfway into the shoulder, though he backed off eventually. I saw his face as we passed him, and man he was just pissed beyond all belief. Little did they know, we said, that what we were doing was actually legal!

Only I started to realize that I hadn't seen one of those you-can-drive-on-the-median signs for quite some time... certainly not since I started driving on the median. So, uh, I slipped into the left lane at the next available opening. Whoops.

Our other big road adventure was stopping for food and gas in the town of Pooler outside Savannah. Hayley had insisted we get Chick-fil-A, which took about forty minutes of driving. But on arriving, we discovered the Chick-fil-A was closed... and so was the McDonald's, and the Arby's, and the Five Guys, and basically every fast food restaurant at the whole exit except for a Sonic. The Sonic was drive-thru only, and the drive-thru line wrapped around the whole building! My Google Timeline tells me we spent forty minutes in Pooler between driving up to a bunch of closed restaurants, and waiting in line at the Sonic. (It was, I believe, my first time ever getting anything other than a shake at a Sonic.)

We made it to Columbia without further incident. We ended up mostly just hanging out with Jared and Angela: though Irma was by this point projected to go up through Georgia, there was enough wind and rain heading for Columbia that basically everything was closed. (Our friend Angela works at Publix, and she reported that everyone bought bread and ice cream in preparation for the storm. Like, ice cream? Do you get how storms work?) So we just watched a lot of tv: four episodes of Futurama, three of Rick and Morty (my first-ever episodes, fact fans), and all three Edgar Wright/Simon Pegg action comedies. and pored over the livestreams. Hayley watched the local news; I just kept looking at a webcam pointed at the UT campus.

Irma made landfall in Florida Sunday night, but wasn't supposed to hit Tampa until 1am, and neither of us could stay up that late. Even by the time we went to bed, though, it was clear Irma was a lot weaker and less close to Tampa than predicted. My glimpses of the UT webcam were just not terribly interesting. Monday, there was lots of wind and rain in Columbia, though nothing too bad where we were.

So, on Tuesday with no information about our home (would it have windows still? a roof? power? would the pool have flooded into my living room? would a looter have stolen all my Doctor Who audio dramas?), we headed back to Florida (via Augusta, Georgia, where another friend of ours resides). The drive home was much less smooth: for the last forty miles of I-95 S in Georgia, every exit was barricaded by the state highway patrol, sometimes supplemented by the armed forces! As far as I could tell, there was no advance warning of this. Thankfully we'd gassed up in Augusta despite having over half a tank, or we might have been in some trouble. We later found out that the entire county was basically without power, so they just kept all the returning refugees on the interstates. (As was the first rest stop in Florida, meaning we had to use port-a-potties.) It was a little creepy at first, like something out of a post-apocalyptic television programme.

Getting off the interstate in our town was a little worrisome, as there were clearly a lot of power outages. But when we arrived in our subdivision, all the lights were on-- and when we got inside our home, everything was fine. No windows broken, the roof was still on, the power had recently come back up, and no one had stolen my copies of Zagreus and Renaissance of the Daleks. The only damage is that some of the screen segments on our pool enclosure were torn (several already were).

Things are slowly returning to normal here, though I'm excited for every extra day where they don't charge on the toll highways. UT reopened yesterday, though I anticipate a significant fraction of my students will still be missing from class today, as they work their ways back to Tampa as the transportation infrastructure revitalizes. (A guy I talked to in the faculty lounge yesterday said only half his students were in class.) My wife ended up with the whole week off; she won't go back until Monday. Some of my colleagues are still without power, though I haven't talked to anyone who's suffered major damage yet, thankfully.

We were definitely lucky. We've got to get some plywood and prep window boards ahead of time once supplies come back. Anyone know the best way to board up your windows when your exterior is made of stucco?