My dear ol' departed Mother used to say, "Whether it's good or whether it's bad, the weather we get is the weather we have." There's probably sage advice in there, but she's also the same person who would tell me, "Your ass is talking, your mouth knows better."
Not really sure my mouth knew better. But, I was a weather nerd even as a kid.
We had another ugly storm last night. Before we went to bed, the weather weasels said that the nasty stuff would move south of us. They were wrong. 80+ mph straight line winds (that's into hurricane territory) and heavy horizontal rain being blown in those winds.
Once again, we were awakened after 1:00 am. Joan had disappeared from our bed to go put bricks on top of the table cover. We turned on the TV and the local weather folks were on... never a good sign at 1:00 in the morning. Severe thunderstorm warnings, strong straight line winds, and flash flood warnings... yep, we have all of that. We couldn't see across the canal. The power went out 3 times. And, by 2:15 it had moved on... with warnings that there would be more strong gusty wind behind this gust front.
When we got up this morning, Joan looked out one of our bedroom windows and said, "That isn't good." The view was of our neighbor's park home...
Palm branches down everywhere (we keep our palm tree trimmed). Look beyond the rear of her car: that is a large plastic dock box that came from her neighbor's yard. We got dressed and walked around our house. Nothing significant other than a bunch of debris from the palm trees stuck to the side of the house.
Joan found the neighbor's boat motor cover floating in the canal and fished it out. I went across the street and started picking up branches in the neighbor's yard. I saw that some of the skirting on the house was coming out and put that back together. Joan saw that the neighbor's sunscreen (that rolls down) had come apart and the steel bar that weights down the bottom of it had flown out - we were lucky that heavy bar didn't hit our house. I called that neighbor (he lives in the Valley) and asked if it was OK for me to go up on his deck and stand up furniture and pick up cushions that had blown around - he was grateful for the help. Joan and I tied down that sun screen, strapped his motor cover to a railing (so it wouldn't blow away), and picked up furniture and cushions.
Joan suggested I get out the drone and check the roof... I have now used the drone more (for that purpose) in the past two weeks than I have in the past two years. Everything looked OK up on the roof.
As expected Rufus was pretty nervous during the storm, but we took turns holding and reassuring him. He stayed right there with us when we went back to bed.
The sun came out briefly this morning. I felt OK skipping my usual morning bicycle ride since I got plenty of exercise picking up stuff for over an hour. I had good light to get the photos with the drone... and no wind. And then a few sprinkles. Just Mother Nature letting us know that we can pick up all we want, but she is still in control. People in the village are just starting to post photos of damage on Facebook. I think we got off pretty easy - only a few of the neighbor's palm branches in our yard; there will be general clean-up around the exterior of the house. Some here weren't so fortunate.
Rufus is sitting on the back of my chair as I write this. He's a good boy.
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Damage reports are coming in to the local TV stations. These images from South Padre Island...
Lots of people without power. The last storm was worse in the upper Valley, this one turned much stronger here in the lower Valley.
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