I've had this suspicion for a while now that disasters seem to follow me. First time I ever took a plane flight, on a little commuter flight, one week later that exact same flight crashed. When I moved to TX our apartments were hit by a tornado a few months after we got there. Saw a plane crash at the Point Mugu airshow a while back. Watched Sacramento experience it's two worst years of flooding while I lived there. And now that I'm in Florida, for all of 2 months, I've experienced hurricanes. Not just one, but two. And maybe a third in another week. Boy, am I blessed! :P

Really for us Charley turned out to be nothing as far as directly. It was expected to be a head on hit on the Tampa area, with the eye shooting right for us. If it had done that, it would have been far, far worse than it was, and thankfully it turned before it did that. Even as it is, there are still questions and disputes over the death tolls in a couple of the counties that were hit by Charley when it turned, with no one seeming to have an actual hard number. And the damage that it did do where it hit was tremendous. Seen some of it first hand, and just leaves you in awe, and very grateful that it wasn't us. But as for our home, we barely saw a sprinkle of rain and pretty much no winds. So direct experience, Charley was a breeze, but accross the state it was bad. Very bad.

Francis on the other hand gave us a lot more to "experience" than Charley did. From early Sunday morning until Monday afternoon we got 8 inches of rain and saw a lot of wind. A lot of it. As for how hard they were, the winds weren't any stronger, necessarily, than what we were used to dealing with when we had the Santana winds in Southern Cal (well, maybe a bit harder, but not much), but there was a lot more of it, and it was gustier. And it was those gusts that did the damage. Our apartments only have one tree down, and a couple at my wife's school. But around town there is more. Accross the stree is a whole wall of trees that was ripped out of the ground. Several others are down, and there's one apartment complex that had pieces of it's roofing ripped off. Then we had the 15 hours without power from the storm. But overall, we still came out pretty good, even with the eye rolling right over our heads. Considering what it could have been, I'm not complaining.

And now we may have another one. Ivan is starting to form up and head this way. Whether or not it actually makes it to us or turns some other direction, we don't know yet. And won't for a few days yet. Oh, to be so blessed....

In any case, I'm out taking some pictures, and I'll be heading to Busch Gardens Tampa today when they reopen at noon to look around and see how they fared. I know there is some flooding not far from the park, so I'll have to take a longer route to get there safely. Should be interesting to see how they came out, and I'll be posting up those pictures hopefully tonight.

Which reminds me, if you're interested in my pictures at all, I post them up on my smugmug album, and you're more than welcome to take a look at them there. You can see them at http://sirwillow.smugmug.com Enjoy.