However

In the first few weeks following Hurricane Florence, people outside of Wilmington often asked if things were back to normal. Despite the good intentions behind the question, I found it irritating, although I struggled to figure out why. As time went on, I became better at responding to the question and began to understand my own frustration. To the rest of the world, life had moved on, and there were other, hotter topics to cover in the news. However, even as we began to return to regular routines like going to work and school, they just weren't the same as before the hurricane.

Although I began going in to work shortly after we returned from our evacuation vacation, the university officially reopened to faculty and staff on October 1. October was an interesting month at work as everyone caught up with each other, we discovered just how many people lost their homes (three on my team of just under 60, which seems to be about average), and people attempted to juggle their regular work, catching up on work from a three week closure, and hurricane-related tasks. Many had worked obscenely long hours to clean up the campus, and it looked fantastic as we welcomed back students the following week. However, there were still plenty of reminders that we were in a construction zone, where countless buildings need significant repairs including full roof replacements and the main science building and the campus apartments are still unusable. Hurricane Michael also gave us a scare, and we were all given a sobering reminder of what a direct hit from a Category 4 storm (the forecast for Florence at the time the university closed) looked like, and for a short while the conversations became, "I hate to say we were lucky, but we were lucky!"

Utility trucks outside Kenan Auditorium in early October.

 

The kids also went back to school in October. Jewel's school follows the traditional calendar, and she was the first to go back. Our schools are overcrowded, and before the hurricane five of her eight classes were in trailers. However, the school lost the trailers in the storm, and she found her classes all temporarily relocated into spaces formerly used for electives like the art room, computer lab, etc. The girls spent one afternoon sorting out toys after they found out that one of Jewel's teachers lost not only her classroom, but her home, and the girls wanted to donate toys to the teacher's three children who are ages five to nine. Of course the girls didn't exactly sort out any prize possessions, but, hey, it's the thought that counts.

The three stooges went back a little over a week later due to the hurricane days going right into their scheduled fall break. They ended up being out of school for five weeks, their longest break since the summer between preschool and kindergarten. We had not heard anything about their classrooms, so the boys expected to go right back to their classroom, which had been in a trailer. However, on the first day back, they were told to pack their belongings, and they are now having class in the library and are learning how to work in a temporary space. 

We also had conversations with the kids to help prepare them for the fact that there are now homeless students, teachers, and staff. On the first day back, Mike took a gift card to a former teacher who lost her home. As far as we know, though, our schools were relatively lucky. The smaller school district to our north now has hundreds of homeless students.

 

Halloween happened in October, just like it does every year. The kids wanted to put up Halloween decorations the first weekend of the month. However, I hesitated. Our neighborhood had a good deal of damage. Most of the houses on our street need new roofs. During the storm our neighbor who lives two houses away kayaked down our street and discovered the water was waist high at the other end of our street. Needless to say, many houses also have extensive water damage, and I felt insensitive putting up frivolous decorations when others were going through such hardships. But once I noticed Halloween decorations peeking out from behind debris, the kids and I went ahead and decorated outside.  

I actually ended up with no pictures of our house, but can you spot our neighbors' decorations?

 

We warned the kids that trick-or-treating would probably be different this year and that it was okay if they didn't get the usual amount of candy, because they always get too much. And trick-or-treating was different as we had to navigate around roofers and piles of debris. However, people's generosity was amazing. On our street, there are still three displaced families who cannot return to their homes. One of them still put out a bowl of candy with a sign that said, "Please take two." The kids loved this - everyone says to take one. No one ever says to take two. Another displaced neighbor spent the evening staging work in his driveway so that he could hand out candy before heading inside to continue work on his home. About a third of the houses in our neighborhood were handing out candy, which is about half of the normal rate. But at nearly every house the kids went to, people were very generous, and the kids ended up coming home with at least as much candy as they collected in previous years. Despite what so many people are going through, it was as though there was a collective need to stop and make things, well, normal, at least for one night. And it felt good.

Hurricane Florence Update

I know I am long overdue for an update on our family's situation regarding Hurricane Florence, and this is my attempt to corral information into one location. 

We started monitoring the storm back on Wednesday, September 5, but it wasn't until we saw the forecast on Tuesday, September 11 that we decided to evacuate. On Tuesday morning the forecast was updated to include days of hurricane and tropical storm force winds, rather than hours, and the forecast for rain was updated and being measured in feet, not inches. That was not something we wanted the kids to experience. Thankfully, after living in Wilmington for nearly 11 years, we have learned to simultaneously prepare for riding out storms as well as evacuating, and we already had full tanks of gas in our cars and cash for evacuating. While I went to work on Tuesday morning, Jeff completed the outdoor yard prep for the storm. I arrived home from work around 12:40 and we quickly began preparing to leave. 

I am grateful to have responsible children. I simply told the kids "pack for vacation," and they took care of everything we would need while we were away while Jeff and I tackled the indoor storm prep. In addition to storm prep, I managed to eat lunch, wash dishes, pack for myself, and we were on the road by 3:30 in the afternoon. We set a goal of getting out of North Carolina before we stopped for the night, knowing the number of people evacuating would increase immensely on Wednesday.

I am grateful for technology. It was technology that helped us know the storm was coming and the severity, and it was also technology through Google Maps that helped us find back roads out of North Carolina while so many people were stuck creeping up I-40 and I-95. Technology also helped us find a pet friendly hotel in Virginia, through a combination of the hotels.com website and a wonderful customer service agent from hotels.com who located and booked a room for us while rooms were being booked so quickly you could watch them disappear from the website in real time.

I am grateful for my family. My immediate family who is safe, as well as my extended family. In the chaos of Tuesday, it wasn't until we were sitting in the parking lot of a sold out Red Roof Inn, packed with zombie parents trying to wrangle children and dogs after 10:00 at night, that we called family and asked if it was okay to arrive the following afternoon with two adults, four kids, and a 70 pound dog and stay indefinitely. Of course it was okay.

I am grateful to be staying in a city filled with plenty of activities for my family to enjoy. On Friday morning, we watched the footage as the eye of Hurricane Florence made landfall at Wrightsville Beach, our weekend hangout, located just a few miles from our house. We showed the kids the footage on TV of Jim Cantore getting knocked sideways as he stood in the middle of the road while the eye came through. The kids thought the location looked familiar, and we explained that it was near the Cape Fear River and was the place we had stood to eat ice cream from Kilwin's two weeks prior. The looks on their faces let us know that we were done watching hurricane footage with the kids around. It is one thing to watch the horrors of a far away city. It is another thing to watch your hometown get ravaged by nature on national TV. So we have been to the aquarium, the art museum, and many parks. We have visited with old friends and have made new friends. We know many of the kids' old friends have not been so lucky, either riding out the storm and listening to the wind and rain in the dark for days on end, or else stuck in hotel rooms in other parts of North Carolina where it was too rainy to get out and enjoy other activities.

I am grateful for friends and neighbors. On Saturday morning we were still wondering who we could ask to check on our house and the appropriate time to do so, when I received the following text from my next door neighbor:

 

That is the front of our house on Saturday morning, totally intact with the exception of the dead willow tree which needed to be removed anyway. We could tell from the picture that the three tallest trees in our backyard were also still intact. Our neighbor's adult son lives further back in our neighborhood, about a mile from our houses, and he took advantage of a break in the rain to sneak over and check on our houses. 

During the night on Saturday, the water began rising throughout our part of town due to the ceaseless rain. The same gentleman who had checked on our house on Saturday morning was rescued from his own house by the National Guard late Saturday or early Sunday. He still made time to go check on the houses again on Sunday, and sent this photo of our yard on Sunday morning. The dirt in our yard marks the water line from Saturday night's flooding. Water came higher than it ever had before, but it didn't reach the house. You can see the mulch in our flower bed still intact. He also knew we were worried about the back of our house, and took the time to peek over the fence (it was too wet to enter) to at least check for major holes in our roof. There weren't any. And people are truly amazing.

 

 

I am grateful to be on emergency leave from work. I am able to focus on my family without having to worry about lost wages, working all day from home, or using all of my vacation leave.

I am grateful for the media, both traditional media outlets, as well as social media. Although not a heavy social media user, it has proven invaluable in helping us connect with others as well as tracking the situation at home. Our friends and colleagues are currently echoing exactly what we are hearing from the media. Every interaction is the same. I am told, "DO NOT COME HOME." The message is clear. So for now, we are staying in Cincinnati. As the week progresses, we have determined our criteria for returning home. We need to have electricity (we believe it was restored to our house on Monday), roads need to open (as of Tuesday afternoon there is limited land access to Wilmington), and we need to have easy access to food and gas. Reports remain that the lines to enter grocery stores are long (a limited number of shoppers are allowed in at a time) and the lines for gas are longer. We are very tentatively planning to leave Cincinnati on Friday and arrive home on Saturday, although that is definitely subject to change. 

I am grateful to know so many people care about our family. Sometimes it is the most chaotic situations that help you realize how wonderful people truly are.

Hurricane Matthew

Who would've guessed the safest place to be in a hurricane was right on the coast? But that's exactly what happened over the weekend. That's how I felt, and as I noticed at work today, that's clearly how many people felt. Although all of our yards have large piles of debris and look like this

and uprooted trees are rather ubiquitous since the only ones that have been cleared were blocking roads and power lines,

we all recognize how lucky we were.

I'm used to people telling storm stories, whether from tropical weather or winter storms, where everyone tells how bad they had it. But this was the exact opposite. Everyone downplayed their stories in gratitude, until some of them sounded reminiscent of the Black Knight in Monty Python. "Our power was out for 24 hours and our water was out for 16 hours, but no big deal." "A coworker is stranded in Lumberton and is running out of food and water, but at least the flood water isn't getting to her house." Just a flesh wound.

For us the storm adventure first began last Sunday, October 2 when I checked the weather on my phone before getting out of bed in the morning and happened to notice something kinda icky brewing. Although I typically ignore tropical weather until it gets much closer, this one seemed to suck me in, and after living here for nearly 9 years, I found myself dutifully checking for updates every 4 hours. I couldn't let it go.

On Tuesday afternoon things got real when the afternoon update suddenly showed Wilmington getting a direct hit from a strong Category 2 storm. Yikearooni. That's when UNCW decided to evacuate students by noon on Thursday. Tuesday night while the boys were at karate I decided to make a supply run, just in case the forecast didn't change, and people went crazy at the store later in the week. I found Target already out of cases of water. Thankfully the grocery store was much better prepared and had filled all of the perimeter aisles with pallets of bottled water.

After all the Tuesday drama, the forecast looked much better Wednesday and Thursday. Lots and lots and lots of rain, but for the most part, Wilmington can handle that. Our soil is sand, which is lousy for gardening, but great for draining heavy rain. And the neighborhoods built after Hurricane Floyd have retention ponds and drainage ditches and other modifications to help manage storm water.

Thursday night as I was going to bed I got a voicemail from the power company saying to "anticipate prolonged power outages." I had never gotten a message like this before and didn't know if it was ominous or comical given that it arrived at 10:30 and the first bands of heavy rain arrived around 3am Friday morning and didn't let up until around 4:30. Not exactly a lot of time to prepare if you hadn't done so already!

I had to work Friday morning, and campus was mostly shut down with the students all evacuated. 

There was no Subway to eat

 

and no Jamba Juice to drink.

 

The forecast was for 12 - 18" of rain and while Wilmington IS built for rain, the amount of standing water already on the ground was a bit disconcerting. 

 

Everything changed around 11am when everyone's cell phones began vibrating madly. Unexpectedly, Wilmington had just been upgraded to a hurricane warning. The rains looked like they would be mostly to the west, but we were anticipating heavier winds. Work was suddenly a flurry of activity as we went to really close up show.

UNCW closed at noon on Friday. Given the storm upgrade, when I got home, Jeff and I went to work on the yard. While we were busy moving everything to the garage, the kids played a giant game of Dungeons and Dragons with our tile floors and their stuffed animals.

 

Friday afternoon was relatively quiet as we waited for Matthew to arrive in earnest. When Natalia learned I had the afternoon off from work, she planned a flurry of activities for me to do with her, and we managed to get in the first of many Mommy-Talia crafts.

Saturday morning we woke up to a tornado warning. I spent so long in bed contemplating what to do, that the warning thankfully expired before I had to take action. At that point I was wide awake, so I moved on to the delicious task of using up as much perishable food as possible before we lost power.  So we had chocolate chip pancakes and blueberry smoothies for breakfast, then Natalia and I made banana bread. The power flickered a few times while the banana bread was baking, but it was able to finish baking. 

 

While we had power, I also worked on cleaning the house, and while I cleaned, the kids painted. 

 

We lost power around 1:45 in the afternoon, while watching NC State play football in abysmal conditions (although it was fun to watch the waves of water come off the field any time someone was tackled). Amazingly, our power was only off for about 90 minutes.

Things actually improved in the late afternoon, but around dinnertime the winds began picking up again, and by 7pm the house was shaking and our front door, which is recessed and protected by a large porch, was shaking. There is a very tall tree in our backyard that makes me nervous, so to keep the kids away from it and the wall of glass windows in our living room in the back of the house, I had a sleepover with the kids in the girls' room on Saturday night. Despite the storm noise, the kids actually slept great. I think they were just happy to all be together.

We woke to a beautiful, if cool, day on Sunday. There were still strong winds in the morning, but it was a clear blue sky. Looking out on our street, I didn't see much damage aside from our neighbor's mailbox that had blown over. It wasn't until I tried to go grocery shopping around 1pm that it dawned on me that there really was storm damage. I drove by our old neighborhood and saw that everyone's 6' wooden privacy fences had blown down. I tried to go to Walmart but it was without power and closed until further notice. When I spoke to a lady at the grocery store working in the produce section, she said that there were power lines down with live wires all over her neighborhood but "luckily" some guy had a horrific accident in his truck and when the police and fire fighters came to help him, they moved the lines out of the way so she could get to work. (Perhaps this should've been my first clue of the type of story telling to come.) 

So Sunday we picked up our yard, and on Monday we picked up my parents' yard and then headed to the park. I returned to work today, and for us, it is pretty much business as usual here on the coast. But we are all thinking about the people further inland who were not so lucky.

My Name is Earl

For those who are curious, yes, Earl really should pretty much leave us alone unless it drastically changes course over the next few hours.  We live at the southern tip of North Carolina in the area that is currently blue on the National Hurricane Center map.

http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/graphics_at2.shtml?5-daynl?large#contents

Right now the winds on shore are still calm, and the trees outside my building at work aren't moving any more than usual.  However, based on my headache, I think the pressure is dropping fairly rapidly.  (That or I am just tired, hungry, and cranky.)  The last I heard, we weren't even supposed to have horrible winds or much rain.  We shall see.

The closest beach to us is Wrightsville Beach.  It's a mile from the back of campus at UNCW and about 5 miles from our house.  I'm sure the surfers were disappointed when they woke up this morning.  When I checked the beach cam, waves were only waist high.  Here's the most recent surf report.

Thursday Surf Report:
8:20 am
Building hurricane surf today. Not that big early on. Waist-head high but inconsistent. That will change as the storm draws closer today. Increasing NE wind. Be safe. Earl Satellite

Wind:
NE-ENE 15-40+ mph
(next 6 hours)

If you get bored, keep checking the surf cam.  There should be plenty of surf action late this afternoon and into the evening.

p.s.  Based on the current hurricane/tropical storm names, does anyone else feel the need for a Disney movie and TV marathon???