Well, I had expected to come back over the weekend and tell you about my vacation last week. I went to Florida to see my family. But before we left, we saw a little thing called Tropical Storm Irene on weather.com and thought we might have to cut our vacation short to get out of Florida before it hit there.
We did cut our vacation short by one day, but not to get out of Florida–to get back to North Carolina to tend to everything at our house before Hurricane Irene hit us. We live in eastern North Carolina, not too far inland, and we’ve been through hurricanes before. Heard of Hurricane Floyd? It hit in 1999 and flooded half our county. We’ve seen complete devastation from these storms. Husband and I decided to stay with his dad, because he lives a little further west than we do. So we tied up everything we could tie up outside and loaded all five cats and two dogs into my car along with a cooler of food and water and some clothes.
The power went out early Saturday morning. Tons of rain and lots of wind, some really strong gusts. It was a category one when it hit us, so we didn’t expect a lot of damage. We kept hearing metal moving around outside and finally I saw a giant piece of metal in the front yard, slowly sliding its way closer to my car. It was the metal from the gas station shelter across the road, which had been ripped apart and knocked down. When The Husband went out to move it so it wouldn’t hit my car, he found that the pecan tree in the neighbor’s yard had fallen just next to father-in-law’s house. We never heard it fall, but luckily it just missed the house.
Saturday afternoon, when the worst of the storm had passed, we decided to try to go back home to check for damage. So we loaded up all five cats and two dogs again. They were not very happy. The usual half hour drive took us a lot longer because we had to keep turning around to find a route that didn’t have fallen trees or power lines across the road. We finally made it home. We were lucky in that all we lost were my tomato plants in the garden and a bunch of shingles off the roof. The roof will need to be reshingled, but it was better than losing the entire roof. As we drive through the county, we keep seeing trees fallen through houses or roofs ripped off homes and buildings.
Our power finally came back on late Sunday afternoon. The dogs were miserable during the hot day with no air conditioner. I had to keep putting them into a cold shower to cool them off. The Husband figured out how to cook bacon, eggs, and toast on the grill Sunday morning so we had breakfast. We had to eat the bacon because it had thawed out already in the freezer with no electricity. We also ended up cooking the three packs of hot dogs we had that had also thawed out and shared them with the neighbors for lunch that day. So the power did come back on and was on for a glorious day and a half. Unfortunately, severe storms passed through last night and knocked the power back out around midnight last night. I woke up at 1:00am thinking it was too hot and too quiet and then realized the power was out again. It still hadn’t come back on by the time I left for work (where I am now, typing this very quickly). Our internet connection at home has been out since Saturday morning and hasn’t come back on at all. I’m not complaining though because I know a lot of people who never got power back on Sunday like we did and still don’t know when they’ll get it back. Especially now that the lines that were fixed have been broken again.
I have no idea when things will go back to normal. There are still huge trees and power lines laying everywhere. I came to work yesterday morning to find that there was no power within city limits. I saw two people have an accident because they both decided not to stop at a busy intersection where the stoplights weren’t working. (Luckily, they weren’t going too fast and so it wasn’t a major impact.) I had to wait until there was power back at work just so I could make my house payment since I still have no internet access at home. If it doesn’t come back soon, I’ll have to make some more bill payments here too. You don’t realize how much you depend on modern technology until you can’t have it!
After all of this, there is more that we have to deal with personally. Our dog Daisy has been sick for the last couple of months. She had fluid building up all around her heart and lungs, making it difficult for her to breathe. In the last two weeks, she became even worse, coughing and wheezing constantly. She was losing her appetite and didn’t move as much as she used to. We decided we couldn’t put her through anymore of it and had her put to sleep yesterday afternoon. I’ve had pets die before now, but it never gets any easier even when I know it’s keeping them from more suffering.
It’s going to be hard to explain to my four-year-old niece about Daisy. While we were in Florida, we took our other dog Chloe with us and left Daisy in my grandmother’s care since she was so sick. My niece loves Chloe and Daisy and she kept asking me why Daisy couldn’t come with us. Then she said, “Maybe next time, Daisy won’t be sick so she can come visit too!” 🙁