Hey guys! We still have power, so I'm going to try and do a quick blog of our day. I'll see if I can get through it quick before we lose it. We know it's coming for us, you can see our friends in the Tampa area posting about when they lose it, and it's kind of been happening from the south to the north. We've had at least a dozen flashes at this point, but nothing more than a few seconds. The last few were brown outs though. Everyone's been running around trying to have last minute microwavable snacks, brushing teeth before we have to do it by flash light, and using our devices while they can still be plugged in. (Nobody's been allowed to use their stuff not plugged in all day, so whenever it does go out, everything we have will be at 100%.
So, I lifted some pictures for this blog off of social media, so I can kind of give you a picture about what has been going on around us.
The boys slept out in the family room last night. Originally they had said we could be getting tropical storm winds by 8 am, and I didn't want them sleeping by their bedroom windows if that was the case. (Calib's bed is right up against a window). I said if they got up early, they could sleep in their rooms. But, they aren't get up early people. The family room only has the windows of the french doors, which are protected by the alcove and the screened in porch.
I slept pretty well last night. The 11 am update was encouraging, I took some nyquil, and I was out. (Good thing too, because if I had stayed up for the 2 am update, I probably wouldn't have slept so well.) We got up, picked out our 'hurricane outfits' which we decided was comfy/pajama like, did Facetime with my mom to assure her we'd be ok, and we did a quick check outside, and to our surprise, we got our Sunday paper. I thought it was fitting how it was laying in the driveway.
Porkchop needed his thunder jacket fairly early today, and Ellie feels better when she's chewing on a rawhide.
We had our morning coffee, and flipped on the TV. But when we turned on CNN, we realized Anderson Cooper had made his way to Tampa.
In fact Al Roker was here too, and Lester Holt (that's them there with our Tampa mayor Bob Buckhorn), and that just doesn't spell good things for your city when they show up for bad weather. (But I mean, the fan girl in me was kind of excited Anderson Cooper was like 20 miles from me!)
Today was not only hurricane arrival day, but also the very first NFL Sunday of the season. Usually, I'd feel like a kid on Christmas. But, the Bucs weren't playing, and we couldn't get any games because our local stations were all wall to wall hurricane. Thank God for NFL Redzone. Scott Hanson had us covered. And we couldn't have NFL Sunday without a Taco Bar. I didn't want to dirty many dishes, in case I couldn't use the dishwasher- or water for that matter, so it wasn't my prettiest taco bar ever. Nothing got put in cute little bowls, but it worked, and the boys didn't care.
Asa clocked in at 1. We moved his work from home computer out of the office to the middle of the house. It sits next to a window, so we thought that would be best. His plan is to stay clocked in as long as we still have power. We never would have imagined he would have still be clocked in at 9:30, or that we'd still be able to get football games. We made it through the 1 and 4 o'clock games and now we're on to Sunday Night Football, it's amazing! Football, drinks, and tacos! It wasn't what I had pictured for the first day of NFL, but we made the best of it.
We were responsible in our football watching though. We kept the local news on the TV in the bedroom so we could check updates, and we had everyone shower so we could fill the bathtub with water if we need it (We also have a big plastic tub sitting in our shower with extra water).
My twitter feed all afternoon was either football or hurricane related. The big news is that the water was being sucked out of the river and the bay. Because the storm was churning the water out, people could WALK on the bay. I don't know how to tell you how bananas that is, but that's bananas!
I was fascinated. But then, I heard about this stranded manatee, and I was terribly sad. Don't worry, I followed his story, he was rescued!
Speaking of animals being rescued, we had some nasty wind gusts this morning, and it was raining kind of hard. I opened the front door to check on things, and the neighborhood cat who likes to sleep on our porch was out there shivering, meowing at me. We set up Ellie's crate in Calib's room, and as not to disturb any of our other pets we snuck 'Herman' (as he's called) into the house. It was around then we got good news, Irma had been downgraded to a Cat 2. Peyton said we upgraded to a CAT 3! (Since we have two of our own) Hopefully nobody is looking for him, but I couldn't leave him out there. He's been sleeping on his carpet square in the crate pretty happily since we brought him in.
Speaking of other animals, the boys wanted to leave the house and go to their old elementary school, which is a pet friendly shelter. So pet friendly it's not just for dogs and cats. They had skunks and pigs!
In other cute hurricane animal news, this guy was out on the riverwalk today.
And the flamingos at Busch Gardens were led to shelter. Single file, guys!
Our pets have been doing ok. I let them out a lot this afternoon between rain bands. I kept telling them to let it all out, because it might be the last time. Ellie seemed unphased, and only wanted to chase lizards. Porkchop was not really having it.
The last time I let them out, the yard had a few inches of water in it. For Ellie, that was fine. But Porkchop and Phenom sit a little closer to the ground, and they were getting pretty wet. I'm hoping we don't get as much rain as they had predicted, because the yard is not doing so well.
But by midafternoon the storm had come on shore around Naples. This was good for us, and what I'd been hoping for. The storm is huge though, as it covers the whole state. (Also check out the flights flying in the southwest today- none over Florida, TPA closed at 8 pm last night. It's all so weird!)
There were some pictures of downtown Tampa, but it didn't look all that rough yet.
As the sun was going down the winds were picking up. It's not like it photographs all that well, but there you have the view out the back patio. The bottom right of the porch is getting a little flooded, so that's not ideal, but to be fair it does that during some of our summer storms. We squidgy it out and it's fine. You might also notice Asa is some warm clothes. It's not because it's cold outside, it's because it's been so cold in the house (so we can keep it cold for longer once we lose power). We thought the power would go out much sooner though, so we've all been freezing to death all day. I have suggested several times turning the air up, but I've been shot down every time.
We checked out things on the front porch one more time and took a video (you can see that on my Facebook), and took a hurricane self taken picture. There's not much of anything a miss out there, just some leaves and very small sticks/twigs that came off trees. At one point we saw someone walking their dog (oh, Floridians--- which reminds me, there's articles circulating telling you not to shoot a gun in a hurricane..... only in Florida!) We did notice that the mailboxes across the street are gone. It may be that they took them off ahead of the storm, but I just hadn't noticed.
Storm Team 8 said we were getting winds between 60 and 80 mph here in Land O Lakes after that. (It wasn't quite that bad when we were outside, we're being safe, I promise!) When we came in for the last time, we fortified the door just in case. We heard it's not a bad idea to do so, but really right against the door is also pretty protected. The winds seems worse out the front than the back though.
So far, it doesn't sound as scary as I thought it would (to be fair, I'm sure if the power was out it would be creepier). But really, here in the Family Room you don't hear all that much. It's in the middle of the house, and even though it isn't enclosed, it still seems to be sheilding us the most. You can hear the winds much louder in the other rooms, including the closet and toilet room. We'll go in there if need be, but for now we're all hanging out in the Family room, with power, still watching football, like some kind of miracle (the power has flashed at least three more times while I've written this blog, and there is no way I thought I'd actually get through the whole thing!)
We did get a text a few minutes ago from our back neighbors saying they heard a loud crack (like a tree falling) and they were checking in on us. The thing is now you can't really see anything that's going on. It's so dark out there now. We did a check, and we couldn't see anything a miss, so it might have been the neighbors to the other side.
Hopefully I didn't drive everyone crazy with all my posts today, but it's so easy to keep everyone updated at the same time. I can't even imagine how people did hurricanes before social media!
Up Next: So far, so good, we'll just keep hanging out and being glad that this could have been SO much worse.
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