Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Hurricane Wilma was not shy. It was almost surreal. Let me think back... It all started late Sunday night, maybe even early early Monday morning. The wind was so strong that the building shook. The noise alone was scary. I remember getting up around five in the morning to look out of my window and I could not believe what I was seeing. I saw a roof come completely off flying in the wind. i saw an inflatable boat fly through the air as well as trees. At this point I was scared. We still had electric which seemed odd to me. I tried to get some sleep because I was really up all night. As my head hit the pillow the building's fire alarm went off and continued to go off for two hours. During this time we lost electric. It then hit me that we are in trouble. I was really in trouble. I had such a bad headache I was not able to keep my eyes open. On top of that my stomach all of sudden was sick. About thirty minutes after losing our electricity I went to the bathroom. When I flushed the toilet and it did not flush I really began to worry. I went to wash my hands and guess what, no water. My sister and I had both been using our cell phones all night so eventually our batteries died.

I decided to take Elijah down to the lobby to check out what was going on. It was still very early, maybe eight. There were a lot of people sitting in the lobby who had been there all night because they lived on the higher floors and said it was scary to be up so high. I went to the mailroom to see if I could find anything to read. I found a few magazines, Home and Ego Trip. I figured that would take up maybe thirty minutes of my time. I got in my bed and began to think about what was happening and how I am not prepared for this. The things that I bought for the hurricane (food) was now all gone. I did have canned items but I also had a refrigerator and freezer full of food. I knew I was about to lose a lot of things. Okay, such is life. My concern was how long are we going to be without electricity, water and phones?

Let's get back to Wilma. I found myself standing by my sliding glass door just watching, watching roofs fly off, signs snap, trees flying down the road. I really could not believe my eyes. At one point when my room was shaking I knew she meant business. I decided to go see my sister. When I went to the elevators and pressed the up button it did not illuminate. The only alternative I had was to use the stairs. I thought ten to fifteen is not so bad.

Well it went from bad to worse . Since we have NO WATER there is no way to flush the toilet. My father told us to fill our bath tubs with water just in case. I said," that is crazy, what will we do with a tub full of water?" My father...."honey, if you lose your water how are you going to flush the toilet?" He said, "you will use the water from the tub to flush the toilet." Well my father had a very good point but we did not listen. I guess g-d was punishing me. I had such an upset stomach. I now needed to flush my toilet and did not have the water. All of a sudden I got this idea. We have a pool full of water, all i needed was a mop bucket. I checked my closet and found my bucket. I felt like i was on Survivor and this was our challenge. I was so pumped up and excited to find out what our reward was. I wanted to call my sister and share with her my fabulous idea. Duh... our phones are dead. Now I had to walk up to the 15 floor with a migraine and a bad back, not fun. Wendy and I began the challenge. Filling up the bucket was the easy part. The difficult part was carrying this now 15 pound bucket up ten flights of stairs. I keep telling myself, "you can do this, this is a reward challenge." I did it and it worked!!! I now had an empty toilet!! What was the reward........I am still waiting. At the time it was a clean toilet and I was now able to share our secret with some people in our building. I am sure you are wondering what was with Wendy's toilet. If you guessed that we ignored her toilet you are wrong. After we did my toilet we had to walk back down to the 7th floor and then all the way up to her floor, 15th. Fine, now we both had clean toilets.

It was now safe enough to go outside and see what really happened. The stairwell was now a place were you saw your neighbors, people laughing, drinking, seeing how you were going. It was actually really nice. We made our way outside and saw what Wilma left behind. As the day progressed and got closer to sundown we began to panic. I prepared my house with candles and matches, put one flashlight next to my bed and one in the bathroom. My sister at least had a battery operated radio so we were able to listen to the news. It was about seven p.m. and my head was killing me. I decided to eat my last yogurt which i put in the freezer and took a sleeping pill. I fell asleep around eight but woke up at one in the morning. I could not believe how beautiful it was outside. Oh, I almost forget to mention how lucky we were that a cold front came in. I walked out on my balcony which looked like a forest. There was so much debris all over the place, trees, pieces of roofs... It was pitch black outside, no lights. The only light that you could see were the millions of stars.

I forgot to mention that Miami Beach has a curfew of 8:00 p.m. until 6;00 a.m.

I woke up on Tuesday around seven to the most beautiful sunrise. It was also nice and crisp out. I really needed to take a shower but I knew that was not possible. I have some baby wipes so I figured that is better than nothing. Again, I went to use the phone but they are not working. I had to walk Elijah which meant down to the lobby and then up again. My head by the way felt a little better but now it is back. After Elijah and I got home I went to my sister's to see how she was doing. We decided to get out and take advantage of the light while we had it. We needed to go to Publix, hoping they would be open. They were open but it was crazy, no electricity and they had the frozen food, dairy and meats blocked off. We were able to get bread, peanut butter, water and a few other items. We brought the things home and then ventured out to see if any restaurants were open. To our surprise we found several restaurants that were open on Ocean Drive. We ate at the Pelican. It was probably only 11 and we both had chicken. Everyone was looking at us like we were crazy. People were eating breakfast items. We both felt the need for protein. When we got home Wendy and I took Elijah to the park and sat on a bench. It was such a nice day out. As we were leaving there were six French people having a picnic at the park. They motioned for us to come over, they did not speak any English. They were having wine, cheese and fruit and invited us to have a glass of French red wine. It was really funny. Wendy and I took them up on their offer. They were trying to talk to us but we both had no idea what they were saying. He took out two paper cups and poured us each some wine. We attempted to chat with them but everyone just laughed. One of the women wanted to hold Elijah so I handed him off and her husband took their picture. I put my paper cut down and guess what.... the wind knocked it over and it went all over the French man. Thank g-d he had been drinking so all they laughed. Red wine on his white pants... not pretty.

After our park adventure we went to the Radio Shack so Wendy could buy a phone charger.



Here are some pictures;