Josh and I aren’t feeling well. I’ve developed a wee bit of congestion along with that general feverish feeling. Josh, well he just feels like he feels when he is getting sick.

I just thought I would post in case I don’t respond to any emails tomorrow.

The Rasterbator - “… a web service which creates huge rasterized pictures out of relatively small image files.” (link via the CraftGrrl Live Journal community)

Now to go figure out why I can hear a helicopter hovering overhead.

As newborns are, very cute.
Born this morning at 2:32AM
7 lbs, 8oz. 21 inches.

Time for bed.

We have power in the powerless room. Let there be light! Oh the joy and excitement. Now to clean up in there and put the desk back in there along with everything else. There are two things I dread though. Skittles’ litter box must be cleaned and her water fountain is nasty. Of course she hasn’t been drinking out of it, but it’s just dried up gross.

Right now we have to replace a light fixture and do quite a bit of cleaning up.

Watermelon Hat - Oh how I would love to knit that for someone, but I don’t know anyone who needs a hat that would wear a watermelon hat.

Sister in law is home again. I guess it wasn’t time. I think she’s just paranoid/worried/first time mother.

My sister in law started having contractions. Two of her doctors told her to head to the hospital. She is there now, waiting. Once again we don’t know what is going on, but we’ll wait and see. I think her contractions were about two minutes apart.

I’m developing a migraine. I think it is stress related as I am getting it on the side of my head where I normally get stress related migraines. We did finish the roof and take all of the storm shutters down.

Tomorrow we were going to test a breaker and remove a couple of ceiling fans, but I will probably be running my mother’s store until after the baby is born. I guess it is a good thing that the girls don’t have school tomorrow. We’d have to rearrange everything to get the poor babies home from school. Tonight they are spending the night at their friends’ house and will be confused to find me around tomorrow to take them home instead of their grandmother.

Gina, if you read this before hearing anything from your mother, don’t say anything to her. I think my mom wants to be the one to tell her when it happens. You know how she is. She’s been calling her every day to let her know the status. They’re getting weirder every day.

Well, that is about it. I am way too tired to write anything else and I have to get up in a few hours to get ready. I REALLY need a vacation.

CNN’s front page has a great photo of the lake near here. A larger photo is posted here.

While cleaning up the yard I have seen two folks with their cameras.

I think my mom’s shop is closed, but I don’t have the details. Time to get some more work done.

My hurricane weekend, by miftik.

Friday evening:
We watched the way the path kept changing and realized it would be a good idea to start putting the shutters in.

Around 6PM we started. Each window took about 15 minutes. Next time will be easier. We got quite a few up, but left some for Saturday so we could have a little bit of light in the house Saturday morning.

Saturday:
We woke up bright and early. Josh had some stuff to do at the field, so he left. The insurance adjuster for the car came and checked out the damage to our car. We’ll find out their estimate in a week or two.

I cleaned up the house and did laundry while waiting for Josh. We built and installed the three remaining shutters in addition to installing the other shutters we held off doing Friday evening. We noticed many neighbors Friday night observing our shutter techniques. Saturday morning we found many neighbors putting up plywood or whatever they could find. There really wasn’t a lot of time and many stores were closing early. I know two homes were happy they put up the boards. They each had large tree branches hit windows.

We were supposed to be attending AJ’s birthday party at 2PM, but managed to arrive at 4PM. He enjoyed the scarf, clothes, and computer game. There was much Spider-Man and Hot Wheels to go around.

We got home before the increasing winds. I pulled in all of the trash cans and yard items. It was time to begin “hunkering down”. The family arrived a few hours after sans one brother and his pregnant wife. She was worried she was going in to labor. False alarm, but it will be any day now. My brother and sister-in-law arrived before 10PM. We all just tried to go to sleep.

Sunday:
The wind started to pick up a lot and howl around 4:00AM. Skittles was going nuts and would not take her eyes off the window. I tried doping her up with catnip, but that managed to work for about an hour. I woke up off and on. I finally gave up around 6:30AM. I made myself some breakfast and checked out the radars. There was still a hurricane outside, good to know.

I started checking in on some online folks around 9:10AM. I went to make a comment that we obviously hadn’t lost power. At the same time the newscaster on TV stated that many people should be losing power soon because the winds were hitting more populated areas. Lo and behold, guess what happened? We lost power. Jinx! Much cursing of the newscaster ensued.

Cards and Twister were played by some and others took naps. Naps were good. Fast forward to later in the day. Something told us to check the back of the house a little more thoroughly than was done earlier. That is when we discovered how bad the back patio/porch was.

Once winds were around 45 MPH Josh and I climbed on to the roof to cover the areas causing some leaks. Of course the wind decided to start gusting quite a bit. Josh almost fell off once, but thank goodness for good shoes.

One brother opted to head over to his house to see if there was power at their homes. Yes. There was a rush to pack and leave. Shalyn stayed behind.

We cleaned off the back patio. It had become one of the storage areas for anything yard related. It had to be cleaned off before anything important was destroyed.

Fast forward to 7:45PM. We were almost done cooking dinner on the camping stove when Shalyn yelled out excitedly that “we have power”. A single light was flipped on and she noticed the light. Go Shalyn!

Now we are all tired and just ever so not-excited about cleaning up after this one. I don’t plan to take any pictures of damage around the neighborhood. There aren’t as many trees down, but there is a ton of roof damage, flooding, and structural problems. Charley took down most of the trees and Frances filled most of our lakes and ponds. I did take some video through one of the tiny windows not covered. It was really windy out there. I may post them later. Not tonight though.

That everyone, was my weekend. How was yours?

A few of the things I need to do in the next few days.

- Call an electrician to have breakers checked.
- Call many roofers to get estimate for new roof.
- Call someone, somewhere about rebuilding the back porch.
- Find a hurricane proof shed plan or builder.
- Hope and pray that some money comes in to pay for the effin deductibles on all of this crap. Two deductibles for two storms (at $500 + 2% of the value of the home) = SCREWED.

Excuse me while I check my worth at humanforsale.com. Hrm, $2.5 Million. You can make the check out to my husband. Hey, my birthday is in three weeks. I’m probably worth more while I’m still young.

Me tired. No power for 11.5 hours. Back patio interior roof destroyed. Very messy storm. Have video, may post later. Need sleep.