Milton!
Hi there! Usually I do a coffee date post on Fridays, but I’m all discombobulated this week. It IS Friday, right? We’ve had an eventful couple of days here… but we’re fine, our house is fine, and our friends are fine. We’re VERY lucky. But, we had a tornado! Actually a couple tornadoes went through our county. We got a tornado warning, turned on the TV, and they were showing the tornado live, as it was caught on a traffic cam. On the other side of the screen they showed a map of the county and where the tornado was going. It was scarily close to us, but we could see on the map that it would stay to the west and was moving north. Remember- Florida houses have no basements! Everyone in the path was urged to get into their bathtubs. Just about all our destruction from Milton came from these tornadoes. Most of the county is fine, but the areas in the path of the tornado were obviously devastated. The schools were closed Wednesday, Thursday, and they’re closed again today because so many people are without power, and they’re still making sure all the schools are structurally sound. Seeing the damage so close to home, and then all the flooding and wind damage on the west coast, makes me feel a little guilty- but we really had no issues from this storm (other than being temporarily scared by the tornado warning.) We had no damage and didn’t lose power. I had a little unexpected vacation from work (we were closed for a couple days) and well…. I kind of …. cringe… (I’m very sorry!) enjoyed it. On Wednesday (when Milton was still out in the Gulf of Mexico) my daughter asked if her friend could sleep over. Sure! Because it’s always a good idea to be in charge of someone else’s kid in a natural disaster, right? I picked up her friend and we stopped at Target for last minute supplies. Remember my storm snacks? Well, the girls took a dim view of the Lesser Evil popcorn, keto plant-based cereal, and sugar-free chocolate chips. They loaded up the cart with more “appropriate” supplies. I took the opportunity to get a couple more candles. I figured, if we’re going to be stuck in the house, it might as well smell good, right? I had such a good time smelling them all (I always think of the Girl Next Door Fall Extravaganza candle sniffing when I do this.) I love all the names… But this was my favorite: I ended up choosing these two: By the way, did you know that money spent during a storm doesn’t really count? We were throwing things into the cart with reckless abandon. My husband wasn’t too pleased (especially with the mocha marshmallow coffee.) But we were ready to hunker down. The hunkering didn’t last long! By Thursday morning the worst of the storm had passed, and we were left with a beautiful, breezy day. We even opened our windows (for the first time since… March?) It wasn’t exactly COOL. But it was less humid, and we enjoyed the windows open until 11 am, when I realized I was roasting and we had to turn the AC back on. Since I had a bonus day off of work, I decided to start working on my blog to fix the sidebar problem. So if you never hear from me again, you’ll know what happened. No, just kidding- I backed it up! Hopefully I can fix the current issue and also clean up a few other things that have been bugging me. Now, back to regular life! All our friends on the west coast evacuated. Stephany went to Ocala; two more friends drove all the way to South Carolina, and others flew up to New Jersey. We’ll be anxiously awaiting word from them on how their homes fared in the storm. We’re so close to the end- PLEASE, no more hurricanes! Have you ever been through a tornado? Do you have a favorite fall candle scent? Top photo by Greg Johnson on Unsplash