Milton

Scott Hardie | October 8, 2024
Milton is coming to Florida. Are they just giving storms meme-friendly names now in the hopes that more people will pay attention to them from social media? Are Hurricane Naruto, Hurricane OMG Cat, and Hurricane Pizza Rat the next on the list?

Kelly and I are fine. We're in a hotel in Macon in central Georgia with our very confused cat, and we'll be here at least through Thursday when the storm passes.

The drive here was about as bad as the news reported. We'd have left on Sunday but I had an outpatient surgical procedure scheduled for Monday that I didn't want to miss, so we were up at 4am for that. As soon as I was out of the hospital, we packed a few things and hit the road at 12:30pm. It took us until 9:30pm to pass Gainesville, normally about a 3-hour drive, because the roads were jammed most of the way. Kelly. the sole driver in our household, was in tremendous pain from leg cramps caused by the hours of alternating between braking and accelerating. Finally the congestion cleared and we could drive freely, and we made it to our hotel around 1am, exhausted from the long day. Thank goodness we made the whole drive on a single tank of gas and didn't need to stop, because that would have added another hour-plus of trying to find a station with gas and then trying to merge back onto the interstate.

We're worried about our friends, but all of the ones we've heard from have made precautions or fled. I'm especially sad for an acquaintance in Tampa whose house flooded two weeks ago from Helene and then who found his mother dead in the morning from something possibly induced by the stress; he has been adrift for two weeks, unsure how to pick up the pieces, and now he faces even more devastation from Milton. I don't know him well but my heart aches for him, and for everyone else affected. Certainly there are enough terrible stories coming out of Asheville's post-Helene devastation to make anyone depressed. :-{

You know what? Bring it on with the Office Space memes. I can't oppose anything that brings people a bit of levity in the midst of this.

Scott Hardie | October 8, 2024
I am amused to discover that one of the local baseball teams is the Macon Bacon. I will have to buy something with their mascot on it in gratitude to the city.

Evie Totty | October 8, 2024
Gosh that's horrible about your friend in Tampa. I'm glad y'all are safe! Wow @ the dtive time. Would have thought with a 2.5 day window, it wouldn't be so bad. (If I'm computing UTC time correctly - it lands at midnight Wednesday / Th?).

I'm glad we moved just in time, though Jared is still there. We couldn't get him out. He assure us he'll be on high ground (whatever the hell that means in SWFL lol - I guess on a not-first floor apt?)

So weird for me to see a storm not move when I'm used to seeing them do that. Made-up story or not!

Talk to you soon!

Evie Totty | October 8, 2024
RE: Macon Bacon - the local ball team where Sebastian is are the Huntsville Trash Pandas lolol

Scott Hardie | October 8, 2024
Ha! That's a great name! :-D I remember when the Cleveland Indians renamed themselves the Guardians a few years ago, someone wrote online, "If their new mascot isn't a raccoon holding a machine gun, why even bother?"

I hope that Jared will be fine. I'm not too worried about friends on higher-floor apartments. If anything, I'm envious of them.

Evie Totty | October 8, 2024
Yeah - that's mostly why we did not worry when we had to stay for Ian.

When we ran from Irma (24h for a normally 10h drive) Jared stayed behind (can you tell he's a native??) and when power went out at his place, he went to ours two blocks away on the third floor (we'd given him a key)...we still had cable.

Oh! Re Milton. I'd just mentioned to my roommate about how hearing the name and thinking of Urkle.

I'm waiting for Nyan-cat personally.

Denise Sawicki | October 9, 2024
I guess the drive went as well as can be expected, so that is good. I guess most people aren't thinking of my little bird statue whose name is Milton Ruffles.

click image to zoom

Samir Mehta | October 9, 2024
[hidden by request]

Scott Hardie | October 10, 2024
Thanks, everybody!

Denise, your Milton is adorable. :-)

Samir, I agree. I understand the anger that people feel right now, but they shouldn't be directing it against FEMA officials or emergency workers. They should be directing it against A) the fossil fuel companies who profited from the pollution that caused this, lied about their role in it for decades, and lobbied hard against any accountability or alternative energy, and B) the feckless elected officials who let them get away with it in dereliction of their duty to the people. Everybody who has ever used a gas-burning automobile is complicit, including me today, but what choice did the aforementioned parties leave us?

Kelly and I have relocated to a hotel in Tifton, further south in Georgia, now that our first reservation has run its course. We're booked through Sunday but will return early if we get three things:

- Confirmation that the road to our house is not blocked. We live on a dead-end street, so there's only one way in, but I can't imagine that our neighbors would tolerate it being blocked for long.

- Either confirmation that our house is sufficiently undamaged for us to return home to live in it (some friends will check for us tomorrow), or if it's not, booking of a local hotel room or AirBNB to house us until we can get necessary repairs done.

- Either confirmation that the power is restored, or Kelly running out of patience and agreeing to return anyway. I don't mind going indefinitely without power, but it's much harder on her, so I can put up with a hotel room for a few days for her sake.

It's strange to stay away while most of our friends are getting their homes cleaned up and starting to carry on with their lives, but I keep reminding myself that there's nothing normal about a storm like Milton.

I just wish that I had brought shoes other than a flimsy pair of flip-flops. I tripped and almost crashed through the glass front doors of the hotel, making quite an embarrassing scene when I slammed into the metal frame instead. One woman who I almost knocked over looked like I'd given her a heart attack. Big men with swollen feet should not wear tiny cheap flip-flops beyond their own backyard patios, and normally I don't, but I evacuated in a hurry and didn't think it through. Here's hoping that my house is more intact than my dignity right now.

Evie Totty | October 10, 2024
OMG I assume you are ok!

Scott Hardie | October 10, 2024
Thanks! Nothing hurt but my pride.

Evie Totty | October 11, 2024
Whew!

Scott Hardie | October 11, 2024
The roads are accessible and our house has only minor damage, easily repairable/replaceable. No idea how long it will be until power is restored (60% of Manatee County is without power per some website Kelly found) but we'll probably head home tomorrow to wait for it.

Evie Totty | October 11, 2024
Whew, 60%. Hopefully that will be sorted ASAP.

Glad things weren't worse!

Samir Mehta | October 11, 2024
[hidden by request]

Scott Hardie | October 20, 2024
Samir, regarding your last comment: I've seen the news hype up so many hurricanes in advance and then they turn out to be much less damaging than expected, and county emergency officials tend to do the same. I get it; erring on the side of over-preparation is preferable to the alternative. But I also know that the hype creates a kind of hurricane fatigue among Floridians who cease to take the warnings as seriously as they should, because I'm one of those people. I had a sense that Milton was going to be fine and I wanted to wait it out at home, but Kelly insisted on evacuating, and while I'm ultimately glad that we did because it was the right call, I still feel vindicated that even a direct hit in my metro area didn't turn out to be so bad, and certainly not apocalyptic like the news was breathlessly forecasting. And don't even get me started on social media hype; which is even worse than the news and definitely worth ignoring.

Aaron Shurtleff | November 19, 2024
Late to the discussion, but...

Back in the late 90's, Macon, GA had a minor league hockey team called the Macon Whoopee. I was in Athens at UGA at the time, and I always will regret having not gone down to see a game...