KattyWilly

Weather updates from around the state.  Talked to Cindy’s mom and
she said her son Bill in Port St. Lucie survived without any major
damage.  She said that he talked about how it sounds just like a
freight train.  Their power wnet out last night and they finally
got a change to open one of the hurricane shutters to try and get some
fresh air after being sealed up tight for so long.

Just talked to my folks over in Winter Haven and they still have
power.  The storm is moving over them right now.  Their winds
are still coming from the north so the storm hasn’t passed them yet as
the winds will shift to the south once it passes by.

We are still getting strong gusts but no real damage here yet.

It’s begining to get windy.  The outer bands of Frances are moving
through.  We get strong gusts and then some consistent winds.

My folks are over in Polk and the eye of the storm is making it’s way
past them right now.  I will give them a call in a few minutes
once the heavy stuff moves past them.  Cindy’s brother and his
family are over in Port St. Lucie which is pretty much where the storm
made landfall.   Haven’t heard from them since yesterday
morning.  Will try to get an update today.

They have closed the Skyway Bridge has been closed, and the waves are
starting to break over some of the other bridges.  They may close
the bridges over the bay soon.

Took Lindsey down the street and there are lots of leaves and small
branches everywhere.  No trees down yet but the neighbors were out
waiting for one of the really tall pines in back of one of the houses
to snap off.

Watching the radar loops it looks like it is moving towards the west
and north.  The further north it moves might mean less of the
strong winds on the north and east part of the storm would miss us.

“you say there’s peace in sleep
but you’ll dream of love instead

oh the heartache you’ll find
can bring more pain
than a blistering sun
but oh when you fall
oh when you fall
fall at my door… “

“Down to Zero”
Joan Armitrading

Lindsey has a little magnetic poetry board in her room.

Dave takes a trip through northern Wisconsin.
I used to go on bike tours throughout Wisconsin. They have the
county road system for bicycling. Small two lane roads that go
everywhere and generally have very little traffic. Mostly little
farm roads through the countryside. I remember stopping at a
dairy farm out in the middle of nowhere WI to get some water and
watching as they made cottage cheese or something that looked like
cottage cheese. I’ll try to find some of the old photos from
those trips. I posted a few a while back. I’ve got a couple of photos that look quite similar to a few of Dave’s shots.

On these trips we would stay at state or county parks. I’ll never
forget our night at Clam Lake in the Chequamegon National Forest, “Our Job is Making Memories.”.
We had a nice dinner cooked over our little folding stove, got
everything all cleaned up, pitched our tent, well it’s not really a
tent just a big sheet of blue tarp hung over a rope between two trees,
and were ready to sleep. Until the mosquitoes came. After a
few nanoseconds of those little critters buzzing in our ears we decided
to pack up and get back on the bikes. (I wonder if this attracts mosquitoes?) The mosquitoes didn’t seem
to bother us if we rode fast enough. It was amazing riding down
that little two lane road by the light of the moon. Until the
moon went down and then it was really, really dark. Riding by the
light of the stars wasn’t as much fun as the light of the moon.
The road was fairly straight, and downhill as it approaches Lake Superior thank God, so we could see cars coming from miles
away. We would pull off the side of the road and let them
pass. The noises somehow became much louder in the
darkenss. We could hear but not see all kinds of critters moving
in the brush along the sides of the road. We rode all night and
ended up in Ashland, WI.
Civilization at last! We went to try and get a room at the
nearest motel but there was no answer. We tried the Police
station but it seemed abandoned too. I think there was some sort
of festival going on and the whole town was there. We ended up
camped out in a parking lot somewhere.

I still have the bicycle I rode on those trips. I’ve been
cleaning it up lately as it had been hanging up in the garage and
hasn’t had much use in the last 10-15 years.

It’s 3:00 am and someone is coughing. Time to get up and administer some medications.

This is an interesting description of what the pain feels like.

“Instinctually I am listening for the sound of her breathing or to the
sound of her swallowing, and if those noises sound okay then Iím
listening to the sounds of the house to make sure monsters donít come
out of the walls to hurt her.”

I’ve talked about my much less severe version of this before but can’t remember if I’ve
written about it. When you become a parent you stop sleeping, or
you learn so sleep with your ears open. With our first child I
remember being awake in the middle of the night, lying in bed thinking
about the horror I would experience if we woke up in the morning and
our daughter wasn’t breathing. After some period of time sitting
there awake and worrying I would get up out of bed, walk to the nursery
to check and make sure she was still breathing. And then spend
some time there watching her continue to breathe until I felt safe in
letting her stay they breathing so I could go back to bed.

Some
of this stemmed from a neighbor we had whose baby would stop breathing
durning the night. They had some sort of monitor that would alert
them when the baby stopped breathing and they would rush to wake the baby up and
get the breathing started again. And there is a whole other story
about the a-hole that lived in the next unit and called the police
accusing these poor parents of child abuse because they wouldn’t close
their windows on the odd occasions when the baby was crying itself to
sleep.

That heightened sense of awareness has returned (or perhaps never
really left) so that now when the girls are sick and cough or sniffle
at night I hear them and sit awake in bed wondering if there isn’t something I could do, some
medicine I should give them to help their symptoms so they can get back
to sleep. The end result is the girls are actually sleeping
through the night and I sit up all night worrying that they aren’t
getting sleep 🙂

And then when Chelsey was becoming a toddler she would fall out of bed
at night. I would hear the “thump” and bolt out of bed and rush
to her room expecting some sort of bloody horror from having hit her
head on the night stand or something. She was usually just
sleeping there still on the floor. We would put her back in bed
and I would go back to bed, heart racing a 1000 mph and try to get back
to sleep. The worst would be when I would hear the “thud” rush
into their rooms and both were sleeping soundly still in their beds.

And did I ever tell you about the time when Cindy gets up out of bed in
the middle of the night, starts walking towards the girls room, not
responding to any of my questioning as to what she is doing, only to
get to the hallway by the girls room, make some very strange hitching
or hiccuping breathing sounds and proceeds to fall backwards into my
arms and falls unconscious. I don’t think I’ve ever been that
terrified in my life.

Breathing and sleep are wonderful things. I look forward to the
days when I can sleep that deep dream filled sleep through the night.