Florida and Hurricane Irma

I know we have a few members that are in Florida. I am one of them. This hurricane is big and she's nasty. All of Florida will be affected and the devastation will be statewide. I'm going to have to move all my stamps to a safe area. Hoping I can put all in enough bins to keep them safe. The shutters will be finished on Friday, we have enough food and water for a few days. I'm hoping we will have a house in tact on Monday.

To all the members in Florida, please be safe. Let us know how things are going. I know we will loose power shortly after things start spinning around, so when you get power back on and you have a moment, check in, okay?

To all my wonderful customers, your orders have been placed in the Post Office a day early. If you do order from a seller in Florida, please be a little patient with the delivery.

Maybe I'm overly concerned, but the not knowing is making all of us a little crazy.
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Comments

  • 35 Comments sorted by Votes Date Added
  • Luree, better safe than sorry. I experienced a cat. 5 hurricane, no laughing matter. As a matter of fact I lost my collection in it.
  • Luree Best of luck with all your wise preparations. You are not overly concerned for this one as it appears to be an unprecedented storm that has already knocked down brick buildings and taken a few lives in the Islands. Here in Canada we have had a summer of major forest fires in British Columbia but we are watching things in the Southern USA very closely at this time and if we can help our good neighbours we will help.
  • Good luck in the coming days, Luree!! I'll be saying a little prayer for you!
  • Stay safe, Luree. I'll be saying prayers for you, also.
  • Thank you everybody.

    I was able to get D cell batteries today. That in itself was a major feat as nobody has had D cells. That means we will have a form of communication with the radio. I have only a couple of bins for all the stamps so I have to choose wisely. The others I'll be bagging up and putting in the safe room. I now have so much stuff in the safe room I wonder where Rich and I will be stuffed? All is good, somethings will have to come out. I have all day tomorrow to really think and plan correctly.

    Did I say this storm has me rather concerned? Like almost but not quite scared poop-less? Having the eye be about 10 miles from me and knowing what I do about hurricanes makes me quiver. Why can't she just turn out to sea?
  • Thinking of you Luree before you even mentioned it here. Thoughts and Prayers are with you - Please check in when you can so your philatelic family knows you're OK when it's all done. If it was possible, I'd mail you my generator here, some water, rechargeable batteries, you name it!
  • Thanks Kurt.

    Last night the last report I saw the mb had moved up to 919 from 914. This morning they are at 925! This is a very good sign. I've learned through the years to watch the millibar rating. If it is low such as 914, that means it is a strong well formed storm. So the higher the better. And as we see she is now a Cat 4. She's not as tightly formed this morning. This doesn't mean we are out of danger, just means we might be able to keep our roof.

    But wait --- dang Jose is now picking up, forming well and going to smack the devil out of the Islands! What the heck? They don't even have a chance to pick up from Irma and the Islands have to contend with Jose! Will we have the same? Don't know, just need to finish my to do list for the day and then watch for the fun to begin early tomorrow morning into the evening.
  • Luree - Hope you take your Corgi for a long walk before the storm arrives. Once it arrives it will be hard for you to take the Queen's choice of dog very far. Good luck and all the best.
  • Surprisingly when a storm does hit we do go for small walks. Crazy as it sounds. I get dressed up in raincoat and umbrella and she gets a cheap shower. We don't go far and it's never in a hard rain. I do this for two reasons, one to get her outside for some much needed fresh air and two to make sure the drains around us are clear. If they aren't, then I drop her off and go and clear them. I have a neighbor that mows toward the street. Meaning all the grass is blown in the street. Then collects in the drain by their driveway. When it gets to be too much the water can not flow and the street floods. This can not happen during a 'cane. So I clear all the drains in the pouring rain. It drives my husband crazy!

    We have about an hours' worth of work in the yard still to be done. It just got too hot for either of us to continue this morning. We put in about three hours each, that's six hours of hard labor. We rest and then finish up tonight. In the meantime, the dishwasher was run, the laundry is all done, pre-storm pictures have been taken, and the majority of the stamps are safe. I just had to have a sad chat with the few that couldn't make it into bins to explain they are on their own and be safe!
  • Luuree, If you have any zip-lock or similar plastic bags, put the stragglers into those. Prayers to you and all Floridians !
  • Hey George,
    The remaining stamps are in 3 inch notebooks. I just don't have that big of a bag. The way the storm has turned just a bit to the West we'll be getting the outter bands. You know, the bands with all tornadoes! I'm hoping all will be okay. We'll just hunker down and wait this out.
  • Luree

    Seal them in plastic wrap.
  • That is a great thought, Bob, thanks.

    I'm going to see how the storm will react in a few hours. We are outside the magical cone, but with the storm being as big as it is, we will still be impacted with the outer bands of destruction.

    Meantime, by brother-in-law, in Ft Myers has been handed the evacuation notice. His house is stilted up 16 ft with about another foot or two before it hits the bottom of his house. Needless to say, he's not leaving. I think he'll be okay. Told him I will be in touch with him tomorrow and everyday until it's all over.
  • Luree:

    Good luck to you and your brother-in-law. Stay safe.
  • I'm bored, I don't have my little pieces of paper to play with. It's amazing to think of how much time I do spend looking at them and learning about where they come from.
  • Luree - I can relate since the bulk of my collections and all of my albums have been boxed up for months while I went thru some medical misery and because my house had finally been sold. I just bought a new place and the closing should be coming right along so hopefully my stamp life will be back to normal in a few months. In the meantime, I found it therapeutic to frequent a bunch of philatelic websites, so if nothing else, I've been able to expand my knowledge about our hobby. I would suggest you look at sites such as the American Topical Association's where you can even read some copies of their journal (Topical Time). Depending on your interests, a quick google should give you a bunch of leads. The Smithsonian's site is awesome. I realize, of course, these are not as good as the real thing, but they do come in handy to squish boredom. Stay safe !
  • Luree: Its been awhile since we last heard from you. Could this mean you are out of power. If so. PLEASE GIVE US AN UPDATE WHEN YOU CAN?
  • The brunt of it went though her area yesterday. Very, very likely she is without power.
  • Luree -- I've been away from the boards for a couple of days and just beginning to get caught up.

    I'm sure you will, as soon as you have power and internet, but do please check in when you can.

    I hope the damage in your area has been minimal.

    Fingers crossed (and prayers said).
  • I'm here. We lost power about 1:15PM two days ago. It was hot a very brutal. Sleeping in humidity and no air stirring is not a restful sleep. So you get up early and do the yard clean up for a couple of hours and take a shower to get the leaves and dirt off. Try to cool off a little bit more which does not work. Then you think of what you need to keep the food cool and go to the store to find there is water a little bread but absolutely no ice. Groovy, just how much longer and what food will we have to toss. So you go on with life. Try to explain life to the animals is like talking to the wall. Take Reena to the Big Red Store, aka Target, to find it closed. Rats, no Starbucks either :( so we get her home and now I'm concerned because she is starting to over heat. No ball playing anymore. Yea, right, said to a pup who loves to play ball.

    Oh but wait, it gets even better! While I'm out doing the yard cleaning thing, I'm apparently allergic to something as I have a huge welt across the back of one knee! How extremely annoying.

    So we go to walk Reena in the somewhat cool of the evening, 8PM, and the first thing I notice, we have street lights. Look one way and the neighbors have lights, look the other and they have lights. Rich goes in and flips the circuit breaker and ta-da, we have lights! Crank up that AC, baby. But, we live on a circle, only the outer part of the circle has power, not the inner circle. Cool, now we can jump on the internet let everybody know we are okay and see the news. NOT!!!! Cable didn't come back until noon today, while I was at work.

    Although we didn't get the eye, we got the really bad side with all the tornadoes. Really, a lot of tornadoes. Many of them sheared off quickly but if you were so bored you were watching the weather channel, you saw the Dopler and how everybody was continuing to say tornado here, tornado there, tornado everywhere. We all were tired of hearing Jim Cantore say we were under a tornado warning in our area.

    And the clean up will continue. We are very blessed that there wasn't more damage, a few trees snapped, split, and just plain fell over. Leaves all over the place, pine needles all over. Wooden fences falling over. But not that many house were damaged. I've only heard a couple were damaged by a tree falling.

    Paul my brother-in-law in Fort Meyers is with water. His drain field is 10 feet above ground. He placed his golf cart on top of the drain field and the water was over the floorboard. His house is 16 feet above ground and he has 5 steps on the stairs clear of water. So the neighbors kayak back and forth. He faired well, about three trees fell and no structure damage. He also doesn't have power. About 50% of Florida is without power.

    The Keys are a total mess. Everyone is being stopped in Islamorada which is the upper Keys. You can not go any further. Boats are all over the place, on the roads, on houses, IN houses. It will take some time to get that fixed.

    So that's my tale, I'm safe and it was a ride I do not want to go through again! Hurricanes are not supposed to last 24 hours, they are supposed to be in and out, the end. But this one was so big we felt every powerful blow.
  • Thanks for the update Luree. Truly a crazy, harrowing ordeal but you have all the rest of us here breathing a sigh of relief to hear back from you. Stuff can be fixed - stamps can be replaced - people are a whole lot harder to repair.
  • Thanks for checking in, Luree! I'm so sorry about all you all have been through. But I'm very glad you were in a position to come back and check in!

    Although it's going to be a long slog, I hope things get easier and easier each and every day.
  • Luree: Thanks for the update and hope everything returns to normal soon. Many hydro workers, trucks and equipment have left from here for Florida yesterday and I think another group left today. Your friendly neighbours to the north want to help.
    Good luck!
  • THANK YOU - THANK YOU! We were all so worried about you. It looked really bad on TV. Not sure what I would even do in a hurricane. I can deal with blizzards and even tornadoes but not what you've been going through. So glad you, Rich & Reena are all safe. But, now the work begins.
  • Thanks for the update! Glad to hear you're doing OK and that recovery is under way. Don't overdo it!
  • Good to see you back with us, Professor Luree. And like Tom says, take it easy. Don't try to get everything straightened out by yesterday.
  • edited September 2017 0 LikesVote Down
    Thank you everyone. And I do have a tendency to want to do it all perfectly within an hour or so. Then I fall down and say that's it! But really, the yard was just about 75% done with just me hauling 10 cart loads to the curb. Rich was putting the screen back that blew out and when it came time to cut the little Fire Bush tree down, I hauled that out in the cart. I was keeping myself hydrated the whole time and when I felt I was getting a little sloppy, I stopped and did just a bit more and stopped. We really had it easy with the clean up. Rich took down some of the shutters, we are choosing to leave some up to figure out what Jose will do.

    Now it's back to stampin'. Amazing how much time we put into a hobby when the hobby is taken away from us. All was boxed up in the safe room. The boxes are now back on their shelves ready for the orders to be packed up. Of course the albums just went on the shelf any willy-nilly way so that will be a joke on me when I go to look for something! Oh the things we do to ourselves.
  • Love good news! Great to hear from you Luree!
  • So glad you made it through the hurricane safely, Luree!

    What did it sound - and feel - like when you got hit? Were you ever afraid your house might not make it? How did your stamps fare?
  • Yay! I'm SO glad you and yours got thru this relatively unscathed ! I'm glad for me too since I've been coming in here repeatedly during the past several days almost to the point of it being a compulsive disorder checking to see if there was any word from you LOL. Welcome back and take it easy working in all that heat and humidity !
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