Survivor guilt
As I tended to the relatively minor issues around the property this weekend I almost felt survivors guilt. Yes there have literally been people that have died in the storm but my guilt was just more connected to the total devastation so many people suffered. Seeing pictures and videos of what Ian transformed the coast area to were horrific. I had been to many of the locations that have now been destroyed, it’s a very weird feeling in an awful sort of way. Repeatedly I internally recognized just how fortunate I was to escape relatively unscathed.
I did have a lot to deal with related to work. I went into the office Saturday morning to investigate what appeared to be a total outage. It was that but not just for us. The outage impacted multiple carriers, even shutting down the county 911 services. Luckily by mid-morning most services were restored. The explanation I got was a major network colocation facility had a generator failure turning it and everything connected to it, dark. I was also communicating back and forth with management of our office all weekend, trying to determine our ability to open branches on Monday. Surprisingly it appears that we will be able to open every branch but one, the branch in Marco Island that had standing water inside the building. This is a far better outcome than I was expecting on Friday when almost every branch was offline.
On Saturday afternoon I dug out the Halloween decorations. I only got the blow ups for the yard as I didn’t really feel like decorating inside. When I opened the container I saw two brand new boxes. I had totally forgotten that after Halloween last year I bought two more inflatables that were on sale. You will see the new items, the black and white spider and the ghost in the foreground of the picture. Last year I recall having internal struggles regarding if I wanted to put out Halloween decorations at all since I had always viewed it as something Cindy and I did together. This year I don’t have that struggle as I recognized I put them out because I like them and that is all that really matters.
Later Saturday afternoon I road my new Begode T4 over to the park to play pickleball with a co-worker who lives down the road from me. It gave me another chance to ride my new wheel which I am still adjusting to. I think once I get a few things worked out I will be happy with it. I also produced a video going over my initial thoughts about the wheel which are not entirely positive.
A good portion of the night I watched an arm wrestling PPV event that I really enjoyed. I am a big arm wrestling fan for some reason. This event had some incredible matches that were worth the price of admission in my book.
My Sunday felt sort of lazy by my standards even though monitoring work issues was an off and on thing all day. After paying my bills and grabbing coffee with Elsa I spent some time tending to little nagging things around the house that have been back burnered for one reason or another. It feels good when you get to squash some of those small visual annoyances. As I did this work I listened to the Eagles/Jaguars game. It started out poorly with the Jaguars who are coached by ex-Eagles coach Doug Pederson, jumped out to a 14-0 lead. However the Eagles stopped the bleeding and scored 29 points before the Jaguars scored a late touchdown. The Jaguars are much improved this year so it was a solid win, keeping the Eagles as the ONLY undefeated team in the NFL. I can’t tell you the last time that happened.
I made arrangements to meet up with Monique for a bike ride. Well she rode a bike, I took my T4. On the way there I wanted to see if I could finally find a gas station that did not have a line at least 15 cars deep. I managed to do just that on a hunch. I drove up to Bonita Springs to a Racetrac that is just east of I-75. During non-hurricane times this station usually is not super busy. I was able to pull right up to a pump with no waiting, unheard of for the last 10 days. Once again I felt fortunate.
We rode over to the Greenway. When we arrived they had a gate in front of the two entrances but one of them was pulled partially open. I assume they didn’t want people on the path yet but after riding the full length into Baker Park I’m not sure why. Other than some minor damage and debris on the path, there was no problem getting by. In total we were out for at least two hours. I always enjoy my time hanging with Monique and this was no different.
I expect this week to be rather hectic as we deal with the aftermath of Ian. Keeping calm when the pressure is on is an attribute that has helped me in my job over the years. I will be leaning on it this week.