Righting The Rock....

  Back in 2000, Edward gave me a rock for my Winter Solstice gift… Not the “wear-it-on-your-finger” type of “rock". A 2200 lb hunk of sandstone. I am a geologist, after all. It was a perfect fit. We had just lost the Canary Island Date Palm in the front yard and we didn’t want to put in another palm, or other tree, as the four oaks we had planted in 1992 had finally started to get big. Another tree would have struggled to get enough light.

  We got the rock from a landscape supply company, the type that sells mostly paving type stones, river rocks and other landscape-y types of stuff.  Edward had gotten a cubic yard of fill dirt after the stump for the palm tree was ground down and with the help of a friend had moved it from the driveway to the spot where the tree had been. We were ready for the stone, which the seller delivered, which was a good thing since we would never have been able to get it home and placed, no matter how many friends we had. They backed the truck carrying the stone to the pile of dirt and slid it off the truck…  Plunk. Sort of leaning and definitely making a statement. I like that. I Am Geologist! See My Rock!

  For the next few weeks as people drove by the house we would get looks. You’d think we’s lit a bonfire in the front yard the way people were rubbernecking. It was great.  

  Over time, though, the pile of soft dirt that the rock sat on settled and the rock settled with it until it was pretty much lying on it’s side. “We should try to stand that up” Edward said one day.  That would have been a trick involving the jeep several heavy tow straps and a "come-a-long” if I could borrow one from work.  But we never got around to it. 

  Then, a while back, we were talking to a friend who salvages exotic wood from urban areas, explaining that we needed to stand up the rock.  "I can do it," he said. "People I know have winches." Cool! But Peter is insanely busy, and didn’t get a chance to come by… until a few weeks ago. Chris, his wife, called us. “Pete is in the area, and has a little free time, they want to come by and right the rock.”  Sure!

  These guys knew what they were doing.  They move multi-ton tree logs for a living, so they had all the right tools. They backed the trailer with the winch into the front yard at just the right angle, hauled the rock upright, shifted the bottom, braced it with some old hunks of cinderblock, that conveniently came out of the mound of dirt it was sitting on, and settled it into it’s new place.  We filled in the back with the dirt that had been in front, packed it down, and 2.5 hours later...done.  

  Awesome.

  We beat the hell out of the ferns growing around it.  They’ll grow back, I’m sure. We have a pile of river rocks out back from old flower beds that didn’t work out.  I may move a bunch of those up to around the rock to help stabilize it even more.  And if I catch the lawn guys, I'll tell them (again) they don’t need to trim the top of the ferns around it. Now that it’s standing upright, the rock will stick well up above anything growing around it.  My very own Stele… nearly 17 years to the day I got it.

  Morgan Henge Rises! (Ok, it's not a henge... but it just sounds too cool.)

We now return you to your regularly scheduled life...

We were lucky...  very, very lucky.

Sunset, Saturday September 9th, two nights before Irma passed over us.

When Hurricane Irma final made her right-hand turn and headed for Florida, she was a strong Category Four storm.  She had just finished a devastating, and I do mean devastating, trip through Barbuda and St Thomas, as well as chewing up Puerto Rico and Cuba.  Now she was setting her sights on us. We had just finished KittenCon V the weekend before. I'd been monitoring the storm, and knew it was something we would have to watch. When the NHC upgraded her to a 175 mph, Category Five storm Tuesday morning, we knew things were about to get serious. 

Edward began taking stock of our hurricane supplies and making a list of all the things we would need to do before the storm got to us. Each item depended on her track, the predictive models and that seat of pants experience of having lived in a hurricane prone region for the last 30 years, or in Edward's case almost his whole life.  

We made the decision early in the week we were staying. Irma was targeting Florida’s east coast, we didn’t expect too bad a storm over here on the Gulf-side of the peninsula.  The worst of the weather would be in the right front quadrant, in this case to the NE of the storm. We would be to the NW, were the winds would be north to south, a good direction for us. 

We didn’t feel rushed. Tuesday evening, we went out for gas and filled the Rav’s tank. We decided not to take the gas jugs. That decision turned fateful, as gas supplies in this area quickly ran out. But by Thursday, it didn’t look like we were going to get any more before the storm got to us. I speculated that it was a combination of the refineries in Texas being off-line from the impact of Hurricane Harvey two weeks earlier, and the news reports from St Thomas beginning to get through. People were taking this storm very seriously. That was both the good news and the bad.

As the week progressed things looked grimmer. With each day, the track nudged further westward until Irma was pointed solidly at us. Edward has a mantra: if the storm is pointed at you 5-days out you’re probably fine. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't and sometimes it doesn't matter. Edward’s list grew larger. He kept adding things that needed to be done, assigning a day for the decision to execute, or stand down, for each one. But there was no standing down. Irma was as determined to pay us a visit as we were to be ready for her. 

Irma Comin’!  

This time of year, we let the stock in our freezers get low. Should we get a storm, we wouldn't have that much to lose if the power was out for an extended period of time. We keep a stock of empty juice bottles in the garage rather than buying bottled water or special containers. The smaller 1.5 liter bottles are a perfect size to freeze, giving us both ice, and later, water. We started freezing those bottles, two at a time, on Tuesday. It takes about 24 hours to freeze a 1.5 jug of water. The ice maker was already going. That takes about 48 hours to make a 2 gallon ziplock bag of ice cubes. 

In 2004 when Ivan set his sights on us, we bought plywood for the windows. Ivan was the third storm of four that would threaten Florida that year. I'd been to a number of hurricane conferences and seen many of the products available for protection from wind driven debris. One product, PlyLox, seemed perfect for us. They required no drilling when installing the boards. It wasn’t until Jeanne threatened the state 2 weeks later that we measured the sills, cut our boards, and covered the windows. We stored those boards in the garage in anticipation of future storms. In 2008 we had new windows installed, windows that were rated for hurricane force winds. Two years ago we considered getting rid of that plywood. But no, we thought, if we get a Category Three storm we'll likely put them up. They'd be extra protection for the windows themselves, while the strength of the widows were what would protect the house. Irma was looking more and more like she was going to make us very glad we still had those boards. 

On Friday morning I took the gas jugs with me on my way to work. There was a chance there would be gas available. The first place I stopped had signs taped to their pumps, but people seemed to be getting gas. Instead of saying they were out, the signs read they only had “regular". Works for me. I filled the two 5.5 gallon jugs after topping off the Rav’s tank. Now we had extra gas.

"We’re Screwed"

On Saturday morning the models could not have been worse. Irma was staying stubbornly pointed right at us. The predicted track would place the storm directly over us at 2:00 am Monday morning. She was expected to swing a little westward and thus stay strong over the Gulf, before making landfall just south of us. A landfall which would not weaken her much before getting here. Winds were expected to be between 130–155 mph. 

By Saturday afternoon we are almost ready. We were finished, save the last few boards and the sliding glass door. We still weren't sure what we were going to do there, we had a few ideas, but nothing definitive. We filled the three liter juice bottles and we set them on the counter to wait for the storm. We’d photographed the house, inside and out, and laid out each account statement so we would have pictures with all the important numbers if we needed them after the storm. The computers had already been back up and shut down, with the hard drives in ziplocks in a Go-Bag. I even went through my jewelry box, picking out those pieces I didn't want to live without. We got out all the flashlights, lanterns and batteries and set them were we could get to them easily. All of the outside furniture and plants had been moved into the garage. Edward had the cooler set out and ready to be stocked before we lost power. There wasn’t much more to do.

Mike called about mid afternoon. He wanted to let us know he was still several hours away from finishing his preparations, but he'd be over later that night, as his evacuation zone was required to be out by that evening. 

We had two options for what it do next. Nap or go help. It really wasn't a question, and we descended on Mike and Julie with work cloths on and work gloves in hand. We didn't even warn them we were coming, we just showed up. They were working on covering their front windows. The rest of the house already had metal shutters installed. Mike was cutting 3/4 inch plywood with a small circular saw that wasn't quite up to the task. So I went back to the house to get our saw, while Edward and Mike finished up the master bath window. Julie moved inside to finish packing what she needed to go stay with her mother. It didn’t take too much longer to cover the last windows, and from a piece of Mike's scrap shutter track we found the solution for our sliding glass doors. When Mike arrived that night, he helped us get the doors covered. We were done and about a ready as we could be.

With the house secure on Sunday there wasn't much to do but wait. We cooked the last of our eggs for breakfast and about noon we made a spaghetti dinner. We figured we'd loose power about 6:00 pm so eating early was a better plan. I walked the neighborhood mid-afternoon in a light rain. Irma had already made landfall at Marco Island as a Category Three storm. It was breezy, but the storm was still several hundred miles south. The world was eerily quite, save a few brave souls venturing out, or finishing preparations.

The lights began to flicker around 8:00 pm. Edward turned the AC off about 9-9:30 pm after having turned it down earlier in the day. At one point we were betting on when we would loose power. Our friends on Facebook even got in the game. We all made sure that everything had a place. No point in trying to find that important item you'd misplaced in the dark. The lights finally went out at 11:30 pm.  I remember many, many times in the past as lights go out, being plunged into complete darkness, our eyes used to bright lights. We all had flash lights at hand, but as I looked up, I could see Mike and Edward do the same, each lit by their device of choice.   

From there the wind only got stronger. We have four large oaks in front, seven pines, and various smaller varieties in the rest of the yard. We couldn't seen them bend with the wind. We couldn't see anything. But there was one big difference in this storm. We had cellular contact with the rest of the world. We watched the radar, checked the models, and texted our very own hurricane expert during the night. We could track the eye of the storm as she moved northward. Irma had stayed inland after landfall, but she was still strong and dangerous.

It was during the height of the storm that Mara decided to make an appearance. She had been under the bed the entire day. At about midnight she came out, settling on the table between the three of us. A little while later she wandered over to the sliding glass doors and wanted to be let out on the porch, as if nothing much more then a summer thunderstorm was raging outside. 

By 1:00 am the eye of the storm was nearly due east of us. She was weaker than the early Sunday morning predictions had estimated she’d be when she got here. She was a weak Category Two, or strong Category One. We debated the location of her eye, and I thought we were getting some of the eye wall winds. But most of the rain was out in front of the storm, making the exact center hard to pinpoint. The strong winds still were coming in bursts, but Edward was considering giving up and going to bed when came the text from across town.  "Big tree in front uprooted and landed on the garage - came through roof". Everyone was ok, including their neighbor, whose house also took it worse than their garage. Amazingly, they still had lights. We were all wide awake again and we were going to be up for a while longer.

We finally gave up around 2-2:30 am.  We all slept in our cloths that night, in case we needed to get up in a hurry.

Daybreak

Dawn was about an hour away when we got up. We went out the garage door and inspected the yard. There were tons of tiny branches down, but only a few big ones. We could see there was no damage to, and no branches on, the roof. All our trees were upright. It was breezy with a light rain. The worst of the storm had passed.

We went back inside and got something to eat while it started to get light. We took down the shutters on the front door and then went for a walk. That's when we saw the tree down about 200 ft south of us, a 50 ft sycamore lying on its side. It had fallen away from the house and the cars had been parked away from the driveway. The only thing it hit was the road.

We checked Heather and Trent's house then walked down to the front of the neighborhood to check on the roads. People were already out and driving even though the curfew had not yet been lifted. Many people were out checking their property. Most called greetings and asked if everything was OK. Most folks had come through just fine. Mike’s house was fine too, only having lost a few shingles and having a small tree blow over.

In the end, we came through the storm without any damage. We spent two mornings cleaning up the yard and an afternoon cutting up the small tree that blew over in Mike's yard. We were only without power for 4.5 days. Others in the county got their power back 7 or 10 days later. We didn't loose food, thanks to Mike's loan of the generator after his power was restored.  

Others were not as lucky, like our friend with the crushed garage, or my colleague with a branch through her roof.  

Edward did more work than I did both in prep and cleanup. He also got to sit at home after the storm with no AC, tending the generator. He deserves a medal for that. I went back to work on Wednesday, where there was power and AC.

Things could have been much worse. A few days after the storm we drove through the park behind the house. Park personnel were clearing a section of the trail of debris. As we drove by, we noticed several large pine trees had been snapped off 6-12 feet above the ground. The only thing that does that are severe straight-line winds, or a tornado. Those could have been our trees. That could have been our yard. They could have landed on our roof.

Irma is a storm that will go into the history books. She was one of three Category Four or stronger storms to make landfall in the US and its territories in the same year, something that’s never happened before. As we watched Irma approach we couldn’t help be think back to another 2004 hurricane. Charley had moved into the Gulf as a Category Two storm before explosively intensifying to a Category Four in just three hours. Charley was also headed right for us. Fortunately for us, he turned inland sooner than predicted, sparing the Tampa Bay area.  In hind site, we were not prepared for Charley. Had he stayed on his predicted course we would have had significant damage. Irma's deviation from her predicted track was subtler, but had a greater effect. By making landfall in Marco Island, rather than Port Charlotte or Madeira Beach, she weakened enough to take away some of her punch. By passing east of us we also avoided some of the heaviest rain and strongest winds. And while we considered ourselves ready for Irma, there is no telling what would have been different if she had maintained full strength out over the Gulf before getting here. To say we we lucky is a bit of on understatement. Yet lucky we were. Things could have been much, much worse.

I don’t think we’ll forget Irma anytime soon. It had been 11 days from the time we started preparing for her arrival to the time we were finished cleaning up and our power was restored. But we weren’t done yet. Edward and I spent the next week accessing what we did right and what could use improvement. Neither of us felt we were unprepared, nor did we feel caught off guard. Even so we decided that now, while we were thinking about it, was a good time to update a few supplies and replace some that failed in order to be ready for the next one, which may not have been long in coming. Maria was already following closely in Irma's tracks and we wanted to be ready in case she, too, determined that Florida was the hot spot to be in the Summer of ’17.

“Lucky" Photographer...

I’ll never be a professional photographer. I just don’t have it in me to walk up to total strangers and ask if I can take pictures. It’s even more unnerving when that stranger is a St. Petersburg Police Officer outside of the headquarters in downtown. But that’s what I did. “Hi. I have a photo assignment, can I take some pictures of your car?” "Do you have a class assignment?” Well, not really for a class, but it was an assignment, if only from myself.  

That’s how I found myself in the dirt parking lot with all the off duty police cruisers on Tuesday morning.

Honestly, the officer was very nice, and since she needed to test her lights anyway, she turned them on for me. “It works better at night,” she said. Makes me think she’d had this request before. 

I still did everything wrong. My camera was still set up for the previous shoot. Wrong shutter, wrong aperture. Bad light, bad exposure, really nervous. All my classic mistakes. And trying to capture flashing lights is harder then it looks. I think I only got one shot with both lights lit. But that’s what I had. Maybe a little post-processing could save it.

Make that a lot of post-processing. I cropped the picture a little, changed the exposure level some. Then started playing with filters. I settled on one called “Oil Paint”. Oil Paint smoothed a lot of the gritty dirt on the car roof, as well as the mount for the light bar. The trees in the background warped a little becoming somewhat surreal. The picture is for Edward’s poem Remember.  The quality is somewhat dream like, the way memories sometimes are. The only other adjustment was to tone down some blown out spots in the red light. Not the best way to do it, but in this case I was able to take a bad shot and turn it into something kind cool.

I consider myself to be more of a “lucky" photographer. I’m trying to change that. I’m trying to be more prepared when I go out for a shoot. Trying to get the angles and framing right the first time, as well as the lighting. But I don’t think I’ll ever get past the part where I have to ask people about taking pictures. I’m just not that extroverted. Maybe that, too, will come with practice, but I don’t think so.

Read Edward's poem "Remember" here.  

Drawing on Memories...

Felicia - May 96

I sketched Felicia the day she died. I wanted to set in my mind an image of her, one I would never forget. I had started a day or two before. We had called the vet to say it was time. Felicia’s coloring made her difficult to draw. How do you draw black, and still give it texture and depth? She was restless those last days so it was hard to get her to sit still. She wouldn't hold still long enough to draw her, but i wanted to try anyway. I started with the sketch of her facing left, got the outline done and most of her coloring’s outlined before she moved. But then I did something I don’t normally do. When she settled again, I started a second sketch on the same page, outlining her form and coloring again as quickly as I could. For the next hour or so, as she shifted from one position to the next I simply switched from one sketch to the other, the first blending into the second, until both and each were finished. In the end, the two sketches portray both sides of her face, and both sides of her personality that day, one brighter and more attentive and the other pained and lost in thought.

 I’ve always found that if I really want to look at something, I should draw it. In college, during an assignment to collect shells and identify them, I drew each of them. It gives you a different perspective. It forces you to really look at something. This is the only drawing of mine we have on display in the house. I had it framed for Edward in the year after her death and it hangs in the front hall. Some 21 years later, I’m still proud of it, and still amazed that it came out the way it did, in form and in composition, and most importantly, in spirit and likeness.  I still miss you, little one. Peace.

Read Edward's Poem and Essay about Felicia: 
  Poem: https://noddfa-imaginings-fiction.blogspot.com/2017/05/felicia.html
  Essay: https://noddfa-imaginings.blogspot.com/2017/05/beltane-2017-felicia.html

Blind as a... Possum

  The other morning, as I was leaving for work, I was standing at the end of the driveway. I usually walk out and stand for a few moments, to greet the morning, dark or light, and look at the sky in the quite at the beginning of the day. Most of the neighbors are still getting ready for work and there is little activity at this end of the block. But that morning, in the pre-dawn light, I spotted something moving in the yard across the street. At first I thought it was one of the neighborhood stay cats, but the white face soon resolved itself into a young possum.  

  He (or perhaps she) nosed his way through the grass along side the house then turned towards the street. Possum are notoriously nearsighted. This little guy being no exception. As I stood quietly watching (and watching out for cars on the street) the possum continued snuffling in my directions.   

  When he reached the street he paused, then continued across. I hadn’t moved since I spotted him, especially once he turned my way. By the time he reached my side, he was only 3 feet away. I could have reached out and touched him. Just as he started to pass, he froze. Up until that point I had been down wind. What possums lack in eye sight, the make up for in sense of smell. He looked right at me, sniffing the wind, trying to decide if I was just a tree with a bad smell or something more threatening.

  He decided on the latter and took off towards the house behind me. My first thought was that he would run into the open garage and I would end up trying to chase the poor guy out without waking up Edward. He quickly changed course, however, and headed through the front yard, disappearing along the side of the house, headed for the back yard and the park beyond that.  

  Most possums I’ve encountered have been injured or sick. This little guy was neither, just out looking for one last morning snack for settling in for the day to come. Living so close to one of the largest county parks means we get the occasional wildlife encounter, be they snakes, alligators, raccoons or possums. That early morning encounter made my day. And as far as whose-sight-was-better-in-the-dim-light question, I think I won that contest. When it comes to ‘blindness’, it’s not bats that the old cliche should by talking about.