A Year Ago Today - Hurricane Wilma becomes a Hurricane

Though I'd like to forget that we have reached the year mark for Hurricane Wilma, I can't. It's almost as if it's engrained in my system. I literally woke up this morning and the first thing I said, was well, the hurricane was on its way a year ago today. That's pretty much when the real watching and the real preparations started to happen. The funny part is, I know the hurricane was around this time, but I'm not so good with dates especially since the damn thing lasted for three days. But like I said, I woke up this morning and smelled the start of that (forgive my french) BITCH WILMA. I didn't really know it sort of "started" on the 18th of October until I looked it up on the net.

A year before Wilma, we were all prepped for Hurricane Ivan (2004). A friend woke me up in the middle of the night to get me to their house for safety. Before they came I checked the satellite images on the internet and it seemed as the though the big red swirl was already above us. It was strangely exciting (except for that whole facial paralysis part. ME = HATE BP) and it seemed as though we were really ready to take the beast on. It sort of fizzled out and really didn't do much of anything. So all the commotion was I suppose, a waste of time. But we were lucky, it was kind of fun and we didn't have much damage so thank god for that.

A couple of months prior to Wilma we had dealt with Emily. While I had some canned this and that and some water, I didn't run off to the store or anything. I was however, better off than the bf but because he had a solid cement house, we decided to pack it up and spend the night at his place. The bf of course doesn't deal with lack of electricity or sitting put, so when his power went out we had to travel back over to my apartment to check on the electricity. Since I still had it we had dinner at my place and just as we finished up I lost power. So we headed back to the bf's cement block house and waited the storm out. It was windy and rainy, tiring and exciting all at the same time. When the heat was unbearable that bf just went and sat in the air conditioned truck. Poor him. It's amazing at how candles can make a room hot if it's already quite warm in there. In the morning the bf surveyed the area. He came back with stories of downed trees, poles and signs and although there was some damage....it wasn't too bad. He took me on a tour and since neither of us had power, but the hotel zone did, we decided to try and have a nice nite in a hotel. We called every hotel we could to book a night and spent the night with electricity, t.v. and a/c in the hotel zone. It took at least 4 days before I got power again but it wasn't too hard to deal with considering the power in that apartment went off on a regular basis.

So here we are, October 18th, 2006. At this time last year, Wilma had changed from a Tropical Storm (that had formed a couple of days prior -October 15, 2005), to a hurricane. Everyone started to take notice. Especially since Emily. The entire day at work we were getting updates, scoping out the weather and watching people run around the city. While we were certainly taking notice at this point in time...we really didn't know what to make of it.

Here are a couple of the images we stared at blankly:

We wondered if we had to go to work the next day or if we could have it off to prepare for the circular blob heading our way. It's hard to know what is going to happen but due to Emily, we were actually given either a half day or full day off to prepare for Wilma.

We took some precautions in the office. We were on the 4th floor with no other buildings to block us. I had a beautiful view of both the ocean and lagoon and I literally had my desk up against a glass wall. We started moving hard drives and papers. I remember putting all my wires in a plastic bag along with my coveted speakers and I just sort of covered my monitor with plastic. Who the heck knows what is the best way to deal with it. Because my desk had a built in compartment for my hard drive I just figured I'd leave it. Knowing what I know now, we didn't do a very good job of protecting things. We had actually done more when Emily came but we were kind of annoyed that we went through all that trouble of unplugging and moving things when nothing happened to the offices. Just a little flooding but that was normal when it rained hard.

When we left work that night I guess things started to really set in. When you see people boarding up buildings and people sort of running around in a strange quiet, you kind of take note and think, "Hmmm....perhaps I should be running around and doing the same?".

I know I should be....but I figured I would get to it the next day. Don't want to prepare for no reason...