Still alive

Hey everybody. Irma's good and dead now and I'm still alive. Although I've got to say... I've had some of the worst six days of my life. You'll forgive me if I rant for a little bit about what happened.

As expected, we lost power on Sunday late in the morning. And then we lost internet access, land line use, and even cell phone use not too long after the power. Not even a hotspot could connect to a network. That was the extent of the infrastructure damage. About a million people in east Florida were out of power, and trees upon trees were uprooted, with dirt still attached to the roots. Our only means of communication was a crank radio.

By the way, if you have AC, go and thank it for existing. No, really, do it. You guys have no idea how good it is to have AC. Let me put it this way: The weather in Florida from Sunday to Friday had highs in the 90s, and night temp lows that weren't much better. Wednesday night and Thursday night were the best, 79 and 78 respectively. And humidity too.

I was sweating almost constantly every day. Thursday night it was so bad that I woke up twice at night because my entire torso was covered in sweat, and I had to get out of bed to sit by a battery powered fan in my room that was dying.

99.95% of the fridge and freezer contents were lost. Generator use was limited. Ultimately, some of this mess was due to planning problems because we haven't been hit by a real hurricane in a long time.

There also seems to be a humidity leak in our house. Sunday I discovered all the books I had in one room were suddenly humid, with wavy pages. Comic trades (for which humidity just can't be pressed out, I believe I discussed that before), and paperback books.

Then I looked in the room where I keep the majority of my books, trade paperbacks and regular stuff, and book after book showed signs of humidity, some of those books I couldn't replace because the editions aren't sold anymore. As you can imagine, it was horribly distressing. Although I do suddenly empathize with Twilight more from when Tirek destroyed her library.

I thought I'd have to replace all of my comic trades, books I'd collected for years and it would take months and months to do, probably into next year, and hundreds of dollars. Not to mention the time to sell the old ones, and dealing with the regular books the same way.

The entire mess left me bored and seriously depressed, and I did little more than lay on the sofa. It was too hot to even work on my story. I even tried to start inventorying the damaged books, but I was still too upset to get especially far. I think I had only logged 40 or so books. Yeah, 40 trade paperbacks, and that was scratching the surface of the damage I saw.

Internet and cell got restored Thursday and power came back late Friday. Clean up is still going on, and miraculously, my books seem to have returned to normal. Even comic trades seem better, if having some very minor damage. Regular books, fine. But I'm still checking them out anyway, just to be sure.

But even if I have to replace some anyway, replacing some is better than all. And having the house checked for humidity leaks is still on the table. With that and the clean continuing clean up, there will be more story delays. I had a remote hope before all this that perhaps I could post a new chapter for Sunset Shimmer Day, but thanks to Irma (spits in her general direction), that's not going to happen.

Still, I'm alive and power and AC has been restored in full. And I'll get back to work writing soon. I just wanted to let you all know that and vent a little.

And seriously, thank your AC for working.