My neighborhood got power fully restored on Thursday night of last week. After 11 days without electricity the thing you look forward to the most is a warm shower. I never knew that shrinkage could be so extreme…
Our nearest gas station came online with a generator during the middle of last week, it looks like they finally got power back today. The local Walmart is still closed, it’s hard to tell what happened but my best guess is that a healthy chunk of their roof collapsed. All the traffic lights on my normal driving routes are working, the one closest to my house came up on Wednesday.
The insurance estimate on my car came in at over $3,000, and that incorrectly assumes that certain bits will be repairable. I’m very happy that I went with Progressive. I was in-and-out of their Miami office in about 90 minues with a check in hand. Can’t beat that. My body shop just got power back this week and they are always busy, so it’ll be a few more weeks before my car gets fixed.
Wilma also took out my main Linux box. It was showing signs of an impending Seek-of-Death after Katrina, so I’d stopped routing my mail thru it (I’ve been limping along with Gmail), made sure my backups were running, and ordered a new drive. But I didn’t get around to the rebuild before Wilma hit, and SoD has officially kicked in. Damned IBM 75GXP. Oh well. My pair of new drives came in at under $0.40/GB, big storage is becoming stupid cheap now.
I’d like to send a special Fuck You out to T-Mobile. They’ve made a big deal out of providing free hotspot access after hurricanes Charlie, Frances, and Katrina. The stiffed South Florida on Katrina, even tho many of us were affected, and again ignored us after Wilma. They were already on my shit list after double-billing me post-Katrina. Now I’m ready to boycott any retailer that has a T-Mobile Hotspot. No more Borders, no more Starbucks.
