Time for another thing I would have posted if I’d had a blog at the time. This is from the runup to Hurricane Charlie. I sent this to family and friends at August 14th 2004 03:34:23 UTC. I was in such a hurry that I forgot to actually put in a subject line.

Well, at about 00:30 UTC (8:30 PM Eastern) out power went out. Some neighbors on one street adjacent to ours still had power, but most of the neighborhood was out. We lit candles and switched from TV news to radio news. This was around when the eye was in the Orlando area.

Note from Brandy: Sam can be a whiny brat when you take away his TV!!!
Back to Sam…

We got some wind, but never even close (I don’t think) to the predicted speeds. At Noon they were saying Melbourne would get 80 mph winds. At 3 PM they were saying 70 mph. At 6 PM they were saying 60 mph. Those were sustained. We probably got some gusts that were close to that for maybe a minute or two at a time, but nothing long term. And there were brief periods of a few minutes each when it rained pretty hard, but nothing that seemed much worse than the afternoon thunderstorms we get all the time around here.

Basically, it went to the northwest of us, and was much more compact than expected. So the really high winds were confined to a tight corridor which is within a 20 minute drive of here, but which is not here.

We did have a tornado warning that just expired a couple minutes ago for a likely tornado just south of us by a few miles. But once again, nothing visible here. Which I guess is a good thing. :-)

We are still without power though. I’m writing this on the laptop on battery power, to go out at some point in the future. We still have the land line phone, and my cell phone (which I can use to get online too) and I can charge the laptop in the car, so I guess I may send before we actually have power again. Maybe.

Anyway, looks like the actual storm part is over, but the radio is saying 100s of thousands of people without power, so it may well be awhile until we have power again. Dunno.

Just went outside a few seconds ago to walk the dog. It is clear. You can see the sky. There is a nice breeze, but not huge winds. But… the clouds… are moving really really fast. It is like watching a time lapse movie. They are really low and lit from the lights below (including our street light, which is still on). It is very neat looking. Although a bit creepy!

At August 14, 2004 19:16:48 UTC I sent an update, where I also forgot a subject line:

Well, we ended up having no electric for fifteen and a half hours, and some ice cream melted and we had to realign the satellite dish, but that was about it. It basically missed us. A normal thunderstorm this afternoon was almost worse.

Whelp, that’s the last update on this subject. :-)