After Wilma

The world shut down before Hurricane Wilma hit on Monday morning. I woke up on Monday to the sound of fierce winds and some things that sounded like The Geddup Noise. According to my clock, the power had gone out at 6:05.

We all huddled around a battery-powered black-and-white TV for a while, but then my dad and my sister went back to sleep. According to the various TV stations we could get (about 4), the eye of the hurricane was about to pass over us. At about 9:45, my mom and I couldn't hear any wind, and the dog had to do its business, so we went out (as they tell you not to do during or after a hurricane).

I'd always wanted to be in the clear, calm eye of a hurricane, but this eye was large and cloudy. Outside there wasn't evidence that a lot of rain had fallen. The sky was still gray, and light drops were swirling around in the diminished wind. We went back in a few minutes later, and things started to get ugly again. The lowest pressure we recorded was about 969.5 hPa (1 hPa = 1 mb). It was bothering my ears.

Eventually, the worst of the storm passed, and we went outside to set up the generator. Then we cleaned the yard -- it was full of tree branches and shingles from the neighbor's roof. That took all afternoon. We still haven't gotten all of the junk out of the pool.

My sister, I, and our friend Kevin went around the neighborhood, and we've continued to travel around (mainly by bike) over the past few days, socializing with our neighbors and friends the Bourgaults, with whom we enjoyed s'mores last night. The three of us have played four games of Monopoly, including two today (although got bored and gave up on the second one). We watched TV a lot. On the color TV (powered by the generator) we got good reception for about 2 stations, and they played mostly hurricane coverage (as they still are doing, I'm sure).

On TV they had said that restoring power to everyone might take till November 15 -- then November 22. But last night, we saw that some buildings nearby had some electricity. This morning some houses in the neighborhood had electricity also. For us, the electricity finally came on this morning, after 3 days, 4 hours, and 42 minutes. It's good to be connected to the world again. The only bad thing now is that there's no school this week, and so we might have to make up the days later.

The IBM Model M keyboard is supposed to be the finest computer keyboard ever made. I don't see what's so great about it, though.

I normally don't link to pages full of ads, but here's an exception: The Million Dollar Homepage. It's a pretty ingenious idea: a page filled with a total of 1,000,000 "pixels" (actually small blocks consisting of several pixels) for sale at a rate of $1 each. Unbelievably, over 500,000 have been sold. But the sites that are buying them seem to be the same sleazy ones that subscribe to other advertising gimmicks: the online gambling sites and stuff.