Prepare, Recover, Repeat.

Greetings, Readers.

Well, this has probably been simultaneously the easiest hurricane I've ridden out, and yet the hardest one I will have to recover from. Or rather, the hardest one I will have to recover from until Ivan gets here.

Charley left little to no damage to the house that I live in, but my mother's house got pretty roughed up along the edges. Particularly, there's several spots in the roof that had shingles tore up and off, so there were a few leaks in the ceiling to deal with and some spots to tarp over on the roof. At work, I'd had to lose a day because the hurricane was coming through, and that was reflected very harshly on my paycheck. Also, the air conditioning was out when I came back for about two days, along with just about any other equipment required to keep anything cold. So, not only were we sweating up a storm to get things done, but we were having to clean up messes from melted ice cream and chocolate, and exploding pizza boxes. (The frozen food display freezer was actually stuck in a perpetual de-frost cycle to the point that it was actually cooking some of the frozen pizzas in there.) Also, when all the replacement product came in, it wasn't a small shipment by any measure. And the employees are the ones that have to put it up, typically on third shift. (Yeah, that means me.)

So, no sooner do we recover from that hurricane than do we have to prepare for this one. That meant getting another load of huge shipments in at work to cover for the increase there would be in sales. (Surprisingly, after Charley, the drink product we ran out of most was beer.) And it would also mean having to board/tape up the houses and make sure the tarps are extra secure on the roofs.

Fortunately, for the most part in this area, it seems that Frances was kind to most of the debris that was still left lying on the side of most neighborhood roads. However, she was not kind to the roofs on, and soil around, our houses. My mother's house (where I am writing this from currently) has more leaks in the roof than I want to count, and reports from my aunt's house (where I typically reside, which is made of wood) are that the outside walls are so saturated that most of the siding is now worthless, and some parts are even damaged to the point that insulation can be seen. As far as work goes, the power has been out since my manager checked on it Monday morning, so there's yet to be any forecast on when we'll be re-opening (or when I'll be able to start making money again). I may just end up having to fish around other stores for hours to work. Probably should have gotten a jump-start on that already, but there's other things around here to take care of before I would like to go in for any unscheduled time. Hopefully, if necessary, I can claim some of the missed hours as sick pay.

And now I'm left wondering, what's the point of all this clean-up again? I mean we're only expecting the next storm to come through in four or five days! The worst of this for me is that everything's coming just as I'd started to build some resolve to get out and find a better place to earn money from. So why go out looking when you're going to be incommunicado for so many days in the near future, and - for that matter - don't even know if the place that you'll be looking into will still be standing or operating after the next storm?

I feel like the character in a common "dumb blonde" joke:

Why do blondes take forever in the shower?
Because the shampoo directions say "Lather, rinse, repeat".

So, why is life never going to be back to normal around here?

Prepare, Recover, Repeat.

- Iszi