Just Got Power Restored After Hurricane Irma

By yesterday, my family and I were prepared for Hurricane Irma as it approached from the south, and then it was just a matter of staying put at home and "hunkering down", as we brave Floridians like to put it.  And everything was fine throughout the day and evening: we spent much of it watching The Weather Channel and amusing ourselves over the meteorologists out "in the field" in places like Naples, Fort Myers and Tampa.  The Naples dude was standing out there in the middle of it all, enduring this ferocious storm's eyewall no less, and then suddenly in the background you could see a car start up and drive on by!  Jim Cantore was further up the road in Fort Myers: right as the "dirty" eye of Irma reached his position, once again there was activity in the background: folks chatting it up and walking their dogs like it was any other ordinary day...don't these people know what "hunker down" means?  In any event, Hurricane Irma defied predictions and remained inland long enough to weaken...and then slightly veered west from its northward path, passing us here in Gainesville to the west.  At this writing...around 2:30 pm...its center is on the Fla-Ga state line and it has only maximum sustained winds of 60 mph...

Irma was another of those hurricanes whose impact was strongly felt quite a distance from its eye.  Miami, Orlando, and Jacksonville all suffered flooding and damage from strong storm bands, and in Gainesville the worst effects seemed to come just after midnight.  We lost electricity at 1:03 am as strong gusts hit us and the surrounding area...we finally got our power back more than 12 hours later at 1:20 pm.  Our home was spared damage, but one of the metal posts in our chain link fence broke.  And there were plenty of tree limbs lying around...

There is nothing quite like the feeling you get after losing electricity for 12 hours and then it suddenly comes back on.  There's no doubt about it: some of us, myself included, are strongly conditioned by modern civilization with all of its technological benefits.  Break the circuit and we're suddenly back in survival mode...