A beautiful day in the neighborhood :)


I love that I am living in a neighborhood that has pick up
trucks, a John Deere tractor, palm trees and sailboat masts!
Seriously, this little community really banded together to
help with all of the clean up. Len worked four days straight
helping out various neighbors. It was three days without power.

This was the scene all over the neighborhood, post Hurricane Irma.



Between the evacuation beforehand, the power outages and
clean up afterward, FSW was out of school for two weeks.
When we finally went to the campus on Wednesday when
classes resumed, we passed this at the airport.

It was an old military plane that was a 'living museum'.
Not anymore.  It was completely destroyed.  The town of
LaBelle (which is the town closest to us at 12 miles away)
also suffered more damage than we had in the country.Though
school had resumed, I had students still without power, and this
was twelve days after the storm. This time of year it is in the
mid-90's daily, and it is so humid it takes your breath away.

After just two days of classes, we were back to
work on our property on Friday. Len is putting in a
sea wall (we had some more erosion from the storm),
and I have started scraping and sanding all of the teak
on deck of Kantiya. The heat and humidity has been
 scorching. With the heat index over 100 degrees every
 day, the sweat just pours off of us. I was afraid Len was
going to have a heat stroke carrying 50 80lb. bags of
mortar. By Saturday morning, it was time for a less
 'physical' project- replacing the globe and fluid in the
compass at the helm. We broke the other compass
when we put the rails and bimini up after the storm.
Some days it feels like two steps forward, one step back.

We had planned to take the day off of work on Saturday to go
on a boat ride to the Tiki Bar in Clewiston with our neighbors.
With thunder looming in the distance, and a radar that was lit
up, we opted for Plan B and headed the other direction to have
lunch at Forrey Grill in LaBelle.  Ed and Deb led the way.

We joined David and Terri on their boat.

Terri and I concur that any day in a boat on the water is a good day-
rain or no rain...it doesn't matter!

First stop was through Ortona Lock.

Hold on- we're dropping eight feet!

We shared the lock with a working boat- on their way to AL,
they said, to fish for sharks.  Hmmmm...

We pulled in to the city docks at LaBelle, and took a short walk
to the restaurant. Lots of trees were down, and brush was piled up.
We remarked again at how lucky our little community was in the storm. 

This guy wasn't nearly as lucky. His sailboat was
sitting in about 25' water on the Caloosahatchee.

There never has been a sandy beach on the Caloosahatchee.
After Hurricane Irma, there is one now.

We returned through the lock, this time to a wall of water
which raised us back up eight feet.

Terri says 'hi' to all of her friends and
family- she's enjoying country boating life!

The even better news is we made it back in time for all of the football games....Jerry's OSU won, my Purdue lost their homecoming game, yet my ND won decidedly, Len's UMiami won, Deb's AL won, and Terri's beloved Miss St lost.  And so it goes in the neighborhood- some are celebrating this evening, and others have given up and gone to bed.

G'nite, y'all!

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