Remembering when

From 10/20/05
Last post pre-Wilma
Things do not look so great. It's been raining since middle of the night and pretty windy. They have evacuated the ZH and I am clearing my tables and my floors and putting things on my bed, will move the tv into the bathroom when I am ready to clear out. The computer is the last thing to go. Heading over to the Ceruttis to wait it out. I feel the same way I did pre-Emily but Emily barely got us. I am extremely worried about my friends here, not the expats so much but the guys I work with. Not sure if I can move into VCI as scheduled but will soon enough, I guess. I have the tv news on channel 5 and though it's in Spanish I can understand a little bit. Most of the computer models show it hitting us dead on, though a Cat 4 right now they expect it to return to a Cat 5 later today. Yay!
News flash from the tv - they are expecting it to hit us in roughly 25 hours, but the bands of the thing will hit us before that, it is all pretty unclear to me, even though we went through this before to some degree. Everyone pray that the ZH is still standing at the end of all this, it keeps these families in jobs.
posted by JJ @ 7:31 AM

It's really hard to describe how I feel right now. I know it's been a year and all that, but there is just something kind of ... wierd... inside me. I mean, I've been productive at work (well, as productive as I feel like being) and have been in a good mood (today, not yesterday, totally unrelated to this phenomenon I am trying to describe) and all that, but, I don't know. When I start reading things on some of the message boards, or in Mexico Way's blog, stuff like that, I just kind of feel... wierd.

I have to say, this time last year (this DAY, Friday, as opposed to this DATE, which was Thursday) was sort of a blur. I was at the Ceruttis with 6 other people, smoking cigarettes with their neighbors and just hanging out. I think they pulled the electricity down in the late evening on Friday night. I have to check that, I may have written it down. I do know I had my laptop out and was piggybacking on Joe's wireless signal, trying to communicate with Victoria who was debating flying to Dallas the next morning to take her chances. I remember reading emails from people, and forwarding emails from Weatherdood to some family and friends, which was odd in itself, because Weatherdood is in Illinois for Pete's sake and we were getting our best news from him. I really just remember trying to kill time.

I don't remember the huge gaps of time. Like what we did. I remember watching this big antenna out Janet and Joe's bedroom window, the wind picking up like crazy and us keeping an eye on this antenna, knowing that once it was gone, it was a sign of something, like the loss of hope or something, but it wasn't as despairing as that sounds as I typed that. See what I mean by not knowing how to describe how I feel? By the way, if you haven't been able to tell, I am just sort of shooting from the hip here, not a lot of rhyme or reason, so if you don't follow me, sorry. It feels better when I write it out.

I remember pulling mattresses in the living room. I remember taking a nap in one of the spare bedrooms but being worried because the window could break out any time. How we slowly moved the chairs and the sofa closer and closer into the middle of the living room to where pretty soon we are all kind of huddled. I remember feeling anticipation, concern, excitement, and boredom (this was before the rain started coming in the doors and windows, mind you) all at once.

I remember the neighbor asking me, while sitting at a big table they put out on the landing between the apartments with some other guys (I think they had 16 people staying in the same sized apartment as Janet's), "Are you worried yet?" and me responding, "Tell you what: I'll start worrying when YOU start worrying!"

I remember that I was lying to him.