About 8:30 pm, wind around 70-80 mph and things are just getting started.

We survived our second hurricane in three weeks and this time we sat home through it. It made landfall just north of us again, and Jupiter (our town) was right on the southern edge of the eyewall...meaning we didn't get any of the calm of the hurricane eye. At one point I think we caught some gusts over 120 mph from a micro-burst tornado, which form near the eyewall in hurricanes.

It was awesome to hear the power of the wind and see how it shoved the trees around. I took some video and pictures and will share those later on, but I don't know if they captured everything we saw. The sliding doors actually bowed inwards as the wind peaked, like cheeks being puffed up. The huge fronds on our biggest trees being pulled hard in one direction and a split-second later being thrashed hard in the other direction. The smaller palm tree outside our bedroom catching the light in such a way that it looked like a mad scarecrow dancer prancing, yes prancing, and waiting for the window to blow out so it could come in and poop in my shoes.

And poor Patch kept asking to go to the toilet, but of course I wasn't going to let him out in the backyard. I took him to the front door where there was a small area fairly shielded from the wind. I pointed to the spot and told him "come here. go potty" and he stand there, sniff at it, and just look at me. "Go potty", I'd repeat, and the brave guy would start wandering out into the street, which is where he usually goes ! "No ! Patch, come here !" would get him back and I'd try again to get him to use the shielded spot. He just looked at me, then walked behind me and stood against the door. I think he didn't want to use that spot because it was too close to the house. Anyway, we tried this three seperate times and eventually I just waited for a lull and let him into the backyard. I shone the spotlight on a grassy spot near the back door, which he totally ignored and ran around the house to his usual spot. It wasn't much of a lull - the wind was still pretty damned strong and I was worried about him being blown over and hurting his back, but a minute later he came back, tail wagging and his body totally soaked. We dried him off and he flopped back onto his bed and slept well.

We slept around 3 am, got up again around 10 am, and the power came back at 4:40 pm, which is not bad at all; just 22 hours without power.

We had some water drip into the house in about six places, but strategically placed buckets and plastic dishes took care of that. Of course we'll need to get a professional roofer to inspect it and see what kind of damage is under there. Worst case is that the whole roof will need replacing. Another questions is whether this will be covered by the windstorm insurance that we have; they might just say it was a problem with the roof that wasn't actually caused by the hurricane.

So that's our second hurricane experience in a month - I'm glad we stayed home, especially for the pets' sake, but I'm glad its the end of the season :) Thanks to everyone for the kind emails - see you all later !