So living in Miami, we typically get bombarded with warnings during storm season, which runs from June through November. Luckily, most are false alarms, where the tensosity level in town rises, we buy water and make plans, and then we get missed.
After the year of Wilma and Katrina, I bought a partial house generator, in order to be able to run at least one AC and fridge, and stopped maintaining the thing years ago.
I looked into a whole house standby job, but it would cost easily $30K, and I have therefore determined for that money, I would much rather take my hole family and flee to storm safe area. Typically that means just Orlando, through Irma hit us in the peninsula like a bowling ball, and we had to go all the way to Atlanta. So as of now -- no generator.
Anyway, this past season spared us -- or did it??? Wednesday night I was driving home from Brickell, and the rain was coming pretty hard, so I stopped at Ruths' Chris in the Gables to meet D2 and Iris, who was furniture shopping with her at Merrick Park. On the way home, the rain grew harder and harder, and the wind picked up.
Sure enough, a pretty, pretty, pretty powerful storm came through -- we had 8 inches of rain, and some very healthy gusts. My neighbor Bob said his buddy in Key Largo is a weather nerd, and measured a gust of 90 mph!
Indeed, we had a lot of branches blown off, including some pretty thick ones out front, which I saw had been partially eaten by termites.
Still, I figured just a passing storm, and went to sleep -- to awaken Thursday am to see the house had no power. No biggie -- my FPL app said it'd be back on in a few hours, and I left for the gym.
Well -- not so fast. It was out all day yesterday, and we kept the phones charged with short trips in the SUV. The FPL app kept adding time for restoration.
Luckily, it was fairly cool, and so Wifey and I knew we could sleep with the windows open. Before sunset, I saw a crew walk my street. They said there was a bigger line issue than they thought, and so had to call back the tree trimmers. Still, they said, we'd be powered up again by the end of the day.
Wifey and I lit some candles, and read by flashlight. Around 9, we fell asleep, and the room was actually fairly comfortable. I got up at 3 am, and, glory be -- the power was back on!
We lucked out. I got an automated FPL call at 7 am, and it said that if we still were without power, it'd be awhile -- there were a LOT more outages than they thought. We were happy to be energized again.
Supposably, as Miamians say, things are going to get better. FPL will be putting our lines underground within the next year. This is great for our hood in particular, as we truly are a tropical jungle.
Then again, my buddy Norman told me his lines are underground, and he loses power all the time, while a street or so away, with old school poles, they have fewer outages. So I guess we'll see.
All I know is, we were lucky the blackout waited for our family to leave, and happened before T Day. We have 23 due here on Thursday, and trying to host without electricity may be a bit of a challenge.
To celebrate our latest First World problem, Wifey and I went for breakfast at LOL. We toasted with our coffees -- we had once again given each other shelter from the storms of life.
That was our wedding vow -- and Andrew made it powerfully, literally true.
So here's to better weather to come. Usually T Day and D1's birthday are beautiful. Wow -- D1 is turning 35. Those three and a half decades sure flew by -- her oldest is near 4 himself. She is seeing first hand the poignancy of "Sunrise, Sunset."
Also -- here's to power! Makes things a lot nicer!
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