Hurricane Francis - The Aftermath
Hello again.
Some of you may have been wondering where I've been lately. Well, the answer is, I've been dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Francis.
Things were going great for us. By the time Francis made it to Gainesville, it was no longer a hurricane, and had been downgraded to a tropical
storm. We had a lot of wind & rain, but until the afternoon of Sunday, Spetember 5th. It was bad enough that my job called and left a message telling me not to come in to work, sicne they were closing at noon. Fine by me. I wasn't planning on going in to work anyway. No way in HELL I was going out in this weather.
Since I wasn't at work, I slept late, and got up Sunday evening. About 5pm, I decided to go online, and play some Ragnarok Online. Since I'm generally never at home to play on the weekends, I logged in just in time for the War of Emperium. My Guildleader asked me to come help defend our lone castle in Aldebaran. Initially, I said no, since I don't care for PvP type stuff, but she said all I had to do was sit at the entrance and yell when someone came in. So I figured, why not? I get into the castle, and there's only two other guildmembers there. I tell them to make a party, so that I can use my Blacksmith's buffs on us. Shortly after that, a 4th guildmember shows up, so we add him to the party, and I rebuff us. I was just getting ready to make some humourous comment about playing RO in a hurricane, when ZZZT! We had a brownout.
While the computer was rebooting, my wife said that if we had another one, I'd have to shut of the computer. Since it's her PC, I didn't have much choice.
Sure enough, as soon as it gets to the WinXP login screen, and I choose my account, ZZZT! Another brownout. Poo!I turned off the PC, and headed to the livingroom to watch the local news coverage of the storm. Again, things were going great, until 7:00pm, when a tornado was confirmed to have touched down on my side of town, and was headed for my area. I can't win, can I? The tornado warning was in effect until 7:30pm, and right about 7:28pm, the wind outside suddenly picked up big time! Thinking this would be a good time to do so, the wife & I grab the cat, and go into the hallway by my office, where we had pillows & blankets to get under.
Nothing happens. 7:35pm, we get out of the hallway, and sit back down to watch the news some more, and learn that we're under a tornado watch until around 2:00am. Probably around 7:45pm, we hear a loud noise outside the door. Looking out the door, this is what we saw. There goes our neighbor's cable!
At 8:00pm, the wind again kicks up like mad, and we get an eerie feeling, so we start to make a dash for the hall. I throw the comfortor down, and turn around to find the cat, and my wife is halfway there when we both just stop and look at each other. Then, suddenly: [Insert Loud Noise!] No power. We look out the front door, and everything looks the same. Puzzled, I head to our bedroom to lookout the window into the back yard, and my wife hears, "HO LEE SHIT!". We don't have a good picture of it, but here's a picture of the ginormous oak tree that fell down. It's kinda in the back of the picture.
The tree is so big that it cover the ENTIRE length of out backyard. It knocked down the powerlines back there, and smashed though the privacy fence our backyard neighbor had. As we discovered on Monday, a part of the tree even landed on the roof. Fortunaly, the only structural damage done was the metal facia on the roof was bent a little bit.
To give you an idea of how big this tree was, here's a picture of the roots of the tree.
Tons of trees came down, cars and homes got smashed by trees, lots of places flooded, 16 or so people died across Florida, and this was just a tropical storm. I thank God that when it was a hurricane, it stalled for a few days and lost momentum before it hit land.
We were left without power for 117 hours: from 8:00pm Sunday evening, until 5:15pm Friday evening, and we just got our cable back on yesterday afternoon. We lost around $400 worth of food in our fridge. We listed to the only radio station we could get: 97.3 The Sky talk radio. And they were running off of a generator for most of this.
So, now you know where I was. And with Hurricane Jeanne on the way, and another one behind that, well... all I can say is: Welcome To Florida In Hurricane Season!
I Don't Know If I Should Laugh Or Cry
Once again, it's time for some more fun SPAM! This time, I initially laughed, but now, thinking back, it's so sad that it's come to this, I almost think I should cry... Here we go:
Good thing these people do their research, eh?
Subject: About your site: eds.castledragmire.com
From: asanders@twinsouls.net
Date: Fri, September 17, 2004 9:38 am
To: Elric
Our company is creating a dating web directory (www.twinsouls.net) and would like to add your site 'eds.castledragmire.com/' to our database, according to its description: "EDS ROM Hacks News Archive October 2002".
To register your site please click the follwing link :
Twinsouls Add site
If our resources are usefull for your visitors you can link to us back by using the following HTML code:
<a href="http://www.twinsouls.net/"> Twinsouls Engine < /a>
Yours,
Andrew M. Sanders
Fucking Morons.
N.B. - No, I didn't leave out the "Add site" link. They didn't include one. And yes, feel free to do whatever the fuck you like with that schmuck's e-mail address. Have fun, o loyal site visitors!
Let's Do The Timewarp All Over Again
Erm... yeah.
So, Hurricane Jeanne is here, and guess what? She's following Francis' path EXACTLY. Everything is the same.
I guess that Francis was just a test?