I want to start out this post by saying that I got incredibly lucky with Hurricane Milton. The storm’s path started turning south while it was in the Gulf of Mexico, although it nudged a bit more north as it made landfall in Siesta Key, which is about 40 miles south of me. My apartment avoided the worst of the storm as well as the storm surge that was estimated to be worse than Helene. I kept my pet camera running so I could keep an eye on things and find out if I lost power. While I lost power initially (sometime after 11 p.m.), it came back in the morning. It was such a relief to have power! Being without it for nearly a week with Helene was awful and I was desperate not to go through that again.

My mom’s house is also fine. A part of her fence fell down but Robert was able to fix it. They don’t have power, but they aren’t dealing with any flooding or roof issues, which were our main concerns. It is such a relief.

I spent so much of last weekend in a panic and thinking through the scenarios of what we would do if my apartment and my mom’s house were both unlivable. What do we do? I googled my rights as a renter (I believe I would be able to get out of my lease and rent another apartment, but that’s not a given). I thought about friends we could stay with and worried through all the logistics of staying with someone else while having so many animals to care for, too. I tried making light of the situation at times, like when my mom showed me a cute Halloween decoration while we were shopping for groceries in Ocala, “Well, I’m not going to have a home to go back to, so better not buy it.” It is a deeply unsettling feeling to not know if you’ll have a home to return to after an evacuation. And since two of my friends in book club are dealing with that very scenario (their homes took on multiple feet of water during Helene and they lost everything), it doesn’t feel dramatic. It’s a very real thing that people in my community are dealing with.

Once I learned that Hurricane Milton was heading right to my city, I knew I had to evacuate. I live in a Zone A flood zone and while I live on the third floor and don’t have to worry about flooding inside my apartment, I do have to worry about something happened to the roof of my building or a tree smashing into one of my windows and shattering it. Also, I saw what a storm surge does to my complex’s parking lot and Milton’s was estimated to be worse. I didn’t want to be around for what could happen.

Not to mention – have you ever ridden out a Category 3 hurricane? It’s terrifying. The wind is insane, the rain is nonstop, trees are falling down, and debris is pelting roofs and homes. And since most of these hurricanes make landfall when it’s dark outside, it’s even scarier because you can’t see what is happening.

When my city announced mandatory evacuations for Zones A-C, I already had the VRBO booked and my bags packed. I wasn’t waiting around for this storm.

My mom and I left for Ocala on Monday around noon and thankfully, the drive wasn’t too bad. I know it got worse and worse as the day went on (and Tuesday was a shitshow), so I’m glad we left when we did. That meant we were settled in our VRBO by 4 p.m. on Monday and ready to ride out the storm in a much safer place. And while evacuating is never a fun experience, there is something sweet and comforting about having this time with my mom. I still have fond memories of our time in Ft. Lauderdale two years ago when we were evacuating from Hurricane Ian. It was nice to be able to work side-by-side with my mom, hang out with the dogs, and binge Love is Blind episodes in the evenings.

The cats did pretty well! We kept them closed up in the primary bedroom since it had an en-suite bathroom and a bit more space for them to run around. Unfortunately, we quickly learned that the door did not actually close even when locked, as Chip could easily push his way inside to terrorize the cats. (And by terrorize, I simply mean that he wanted to love on them but the girls were not having it.) So we created a barricade that they could not traverse, which was real fun to step around every time I needed to go into the room.

They ate well, used the litter box, and even came onto the bed at night for lots of pets and snuggles, so they handled the evacuation just fine. We will not talk about the methods I had to use to get them back into their carriers on Friday morning. Let’s just say I had to take a breather after that madness because my heart rate was so high. Whew.

The VRBO we stayed at was excellent, too! It had three bedrooms, two bathrooms (one with a walk-in shower and one with a bathtub), a large living room, a den, and a well-stocked kitchen. It even had a fenced-in backyard! I started envisioning plans for a reading weekend here with some girlfriends. It had plenty of places to lay around and read! (The downside is that they don’t have any sort of outdoor furniture, womp.) Anyway, it was a great find, especially considering we had four pets and they only charged me a $55 pet fee (most places charge $50 per day per pet!) Maybe this will be our new go-to evacuation house.

But let’s talk about the elephant in the room: Hurricane Milton. It was an anxiety-ridden week for me. I was so terrified of this storm. I’m a lifelong Floridian but I do have a healthy fear of hurricanes because while the Tampa Bay area hasn’t been directly hit in over a century, there’s only so long that we can be so lucky. And in the end, some of us were lucky but many of us were not. Which is the way it goes with these storms unfortunately. The impact of dealing with Helene only to turn around and get hit with Milton is a sucker punch of the worst sort. We’re still reeling, slowly putting our lives back together, and now we have this new storm to contend with.

I went back and forth on how much I wanted to follow news coverage of Milton. I have a favorite meteorologist I follow who doesn’t fall into the trap of sensationalizing these storms. He provides factual, helpful information multiple times a day, and his tone is so very needed during an anxious time. He doesn’t sugarcoat what’s happening but his calmness provides me a level of relief. He’s very much a “prepare for the worst, hope for the best” kind of person, so he makes sure we know what we need to do to prepare while making sure there is some levity and hope in his updates. Anyway, from him, I know that the National Hurricane Center provides updated tracks of the hurricane four times a day (5 a.m., 11 a.m., 5 p.m., and 11 p.m.) so those were the only times I looked up his updates. Sometimes the news was good and sometimes the news was bad. All I knew was that I did what I could to prepare and the rest was up to Mother Nature.

The storm was forecast to make landfall around 9 p.m. on Wednesday. In Ocala, we had heavy rainfall all day Wednesday, and it started to get really windy in the evening. Our Internet at the VRBO went out around 9:30 but we still had power, so we were grateful for that! I kept checking on my pet camera at home and was grateful that it was still accessible, which meant I still had power. (The power went out at my mom’s house earlier that evening.) When I went to bed on Wednesday night, the wind was squalling bad outside but I felt grateful to be in a safe home with my girls.

The power at our VRBO eventually went out sometime in the middle of the night. All I remember is that I woke up and the ceiling fan was silent so womp, womp. I checked on my pet camera at home and it was offline, so that was a disappointing discovery but not unexpected. We didn’t know how long the power would be out at our home in Ocala so we decided around 10 a.m. to eat the last of the ice cream bars in our freezer and just as we were doing that, the power came back! And the Internet, too! What a relief. I checked on my pet camera in the afternoon and was shocked to see that it was up and running again, which meant my power and my Internet were back.

My mom and I drove back home to St. Petersburg on Friday morning. Finding a place for gas was pretty fun! We wanted to gas up in Ocala because we had heard that Tampa/St. Pete were completely out of gas. The first gas station didn’t have any gas but the second gas station did, although there was a long wait to get gas. The other fun part of the drive home was stopping for lunch. We found a McDonald’s that had a long line wrapped around the building (they only had the drive-thru open with a limited menu) and getting in and out of there was a bit of a nightmare, but what can you do?! The good news is, the drive home wasn’t too bad! There were a few slow-downs here and there, but nothing too frustrating to deal with. We got back into town around 2:30 p.m. and it felt so, so good to be home.

I was the lucky one this time, but so many people were not. Most households in my city are still without power today, tons of businesses are still not able to operate, and our beloved Tropicana Field where the Rays play no longer has a roof. Things are hard and they will remain hard for a long time. But I consider myself incredibly lucky to have a home where this time I can be a refuge for those without power. Paying it forward, Florida style.

Hello, friends. I’m typing up this post on a Sunday afternoon. Tomorrow, my mom, the cats, and the dogs will be evacuating to Ocala (about 100 miles north of us – smack dab in the middle of Florida) because Hurricane Milton is making its way right to our poor peninsula. (My stepdad is not evacuating with us for reasons I will not get into in this post.) This past week has been one filled with a lot of crying, anxiety, and bad news… and just as the good news started rolling in, the little disturbance that originally formed in the Pacific Ocean became a much more structured tropical storm that will turn into a Cat 3 hurricane by the time it hits our west coast.

I don’t know how to express the level of anxiety I’m experiencing at this moment. I’m terrified. I’m hoping and praying that the storm turns south so we can just deal with tropical storm conditions and not hurricane conditions. We’re still reeling from the damage done by Helene. I have friends who haven’t even been able to meet with insurance adjusters to get their houses assessed to decide what to do—stay and fix, sell and leave? I drive by neighborhoods with furniture and boxes, torn-out flooring, and wall debris lining the streets. Milton coming so soon after Helene feels like a gut punch of the worst sort.

I don’t know what my city will look like after Milton. But I do know that I am blessed to be able to evacuate to a VRBO that will allow four pets in a safer part of the state (considering nearly the entirety of Florida is in the cone of uncertainty, it’s hard to find a place that won’t be affected by Milton, but at least cities more inland won’t experiencing the massive storm surge, wind, and flooding). And this too shall pass. Right?

All I know is that I think I am done living in St. Petersburg after this. I’ll be searching for apartments that are in a non-evacuation zone so at the very least, I can just hunker down at home and not have to worry about evacuating. It’s truly such a stressful thing to go through.

But let’s back up a little and talk about last week. In my last post, Helene had just delivered a powerful, historic storm surge that flooded my car and left me without power. How are things progressing now?

RIP Gladys (11/20/2021 – 9/30/2024)

She was a real one, but unfortunately, insurance totaled the car. I expected it. She was sitting in saltwater and floodwater for hours, and that’s going to ruin any engine. But it was still hard to hear that Gladys, my sweet little Soul, is gone forever. It was a specific sort of loss that I’ve never experienced with a storm. I cried for probably 30 minutes after getting off the phone with the Kia dealership. I was so sad. I loved Gladys and I loved what this car represented for me: She was my first-ever new car and she was the embodiment of all my hard work in order to even be able to afford her.

I was really worried about how much insurance would pay for my car. I still owe $14k on the loan and I wasn’t sure if I had purchased gap insurance to cover the difference if the insurance payout was less than the loan. Thankfully, I did purchase gap insurance (what a relief!) and I found out on Friday that my insurance company is offering me more than the loan. So, once all of this hurricane shit is over with, I will not only be able to buy a new car but I will be able to make a sweet downpayment, too. Will I get another Soul? I’m definitely leaning towards it! She was a great little crossover SUV and really, really affordable when compared to everything else on the market.

135.5 Hours Without Power

My power was out from Thursday night until Wednesday night—135.5 hours total! I checked in on the girls every day and when I was visiting with them on Wednesday, I nearly lost my shit when I heard a loud noise in my apartment and then all of the power clicked back on. I have never been so happy to see a blinking oven light! It was so hard to be without power for so long because I truly didn’t know how long it would be out. The first estimate was that power would be back at midnight on Sunday and then we were told that there was major damage and maybe it would be back on Tuesday but more likely Thursday night. It was hard not knowing when the power would come back and how much longer the cats could handle being in an 87-degree apartment. And it was not fun at all to throw away everything in my fridge and freezer, sigh.

It felt so good to come home after so many days away from my cats, my home, and my routine and just as I was getting settled back in… Milton happens and now my routine is being upended once again. And who knows how long the power will be out this time? Let’s hope that the transformer they had to rebuild at my apartment is super-charged to hold strong through hurricane-force winds.

So that’s where I’m at today. Sad and stressed and nostalgic for my boring life. Tomorrow, my mom and I will head to Ocala where we will stay until Friday afternoon. Hopefully, we will come home to a city that’s not completely destroyed but we don’t really know what’s going to happen yet. That’s the hardest thing about these hurricanes. There is so much uncertainty. It was Saturday morning when we found out that the tropical depression would likely turn into a hurricane and it’s not estimated to hit our area until Wednesday. In that time, the track will shift wildly but we have to prepare as if we’re getting a direct hit. And that means dealing with a significant amount of anxiety over the next few days. How am I going to deal with this anxiety?

• Lots of texts with my book club girls – we’re all going through this together and there is something very comforting about that
• Making my reading as lighthearted as possible. Currently reading Funny Story by Emily Henry and listening to Mrs. Nash’s Ashes on audio. I’m bringing more romances and some thrillers to read in Ocala.
• Staying informed to a point. I have my favorite meteorologist I listen to, and I will look up his updates three times a day (each time a new track comes out), but I will not fall down the rabbit hole of reading scary updates from other people/news sources.
• Figuring out some distraction options: lots of phone games, maybe puzzles/games with my mom, silly TV (just started the most recent season of Love is Blind!), and writing about how I’m feeling (maybe something I’ll share here or keep to myself, not sure yet)
• Checking in with my mom – she’s feeling less anxious than I am (I’ve always had extreme storm anxiety, starting when I had to do tornado drills at school), and it calms me down to know she’s not freaking out at the level I am

If any of you feel like distracting me with cute animal Reels or just check-in texts, please do. I need all of the distractions I can get right now. So much about storms are outside of my control and I have done the things that are in my control (evacuating!). So now… it’s the waiting game. Waiting and praying and hoping Milton continues to turn south.

I’m writing this post on a Saturday afternoon at my mom’s house. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, and the roads are dry. It makes what happened on Thursday evening feel like it was in another lifetime.

When I went to bed on Thursday evening, I had a TGIF post scheduled to publish on Friday morning. In the post, I talked about how little Hurricane Helene affected me. I had power and Internet, the roads were clear around me, and I felt positive I would wake up to a normal life on Friday.

Right before going to bed, though, I decided to peek out my window to see how the roads looked. I knew the predicted storm surge was estimated to hit from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. We’ve been warned about storm surge before but since the hurricane was 110 miles offshore, I wasn’t too worried about it. This isn’t a direct hit! We’ll be fine! Oh, how wrong I was.

By the time all was said and done, my town of St. Petersburg endured catastrophic, historic flooding. Thursday’s storm surge blew our previous most historic surge out of the water. This one was nearly 7 ft (the previous record was 4 ft in 1985). And yes, it affected us greatly.

Including me, as when I peeked out the window, I could see that our parking lot was beginning to flood. It wasn’t too bad at first, maybe an inch or two. It was enough to submerge the bottom edge of a car’s tire, but nothing too problematic. When I looked again a few minutes later, the flooding had gotten worse. People were starting to drive their cars up the embankment above our parking lot to try to get to higher ground, but I couldn’t see how I could do the same with my Kia Soul. (I’ll say here: I really, really wish I had tried. But I didn’t know if my car had that kind of power. This is one of the few times I wish I had a male partner because it was truly all of the men out there, moving their cars up to higher ground.)

(Gladys is the third car!)

I tried not to worry too much. “You’ll deal with it in the morning,” I told myself. “It’s just a car.” And I wasn’t alone—our parking lot was filled with cars all dealing with the same issue.

Around 11 p.m., I lost Internet and around midnight, my power went out. As I write this post, it’s still out (40 hours and counting!). My energy company estimates that it will be back around midnight Monday morning.

The whole night, I was a wreck. Car alarms kept going off due to the flooding and every time it happened, I had to get up and make sure it wasn’t my car. (It never was.) It was warm in my apartment due to the power outage, making it hard to sleep. I was refreshing the Facebook feed of my favorite Tampa meteorologist and spiraling as I read all of the comments (although there was sort of a “we’re all in this together” feeling to the comments talking about flooded cars and homes and boats just floating around parking lots). And I couldn’t stop looking outside to see how bad the flooding had gotten. I took this photo of my neighbor’s car and that shows you the water line—we easily had a few feet of water in our parking lot. I’ve honestly never seen anything like it. I’ve lived in this complex since 2016 and have weathered many storms, and this is the worst thing I have experienced.

I woke up around 6 a.m. on Friday morning. The water had fully receded at that time and I could see that people were already outside airing out their cars. Doors open, hoods open, trunks open. Belongings were on the ground, car mats were airing out on balcony railings. Around 8, I went outside to do the same. I wasn’t sure what I was going to see when I went down to my car, but I don’t think I was prepared for what I saw.

The floorboards were soaked with floodwater and the back seat and under the driver/passenger seats was a puddle a few inches thick of standing water. The trunk was also soaked and my little trunk organizer was wet (but not filled with water, so there’s a positive). Once I assessed everything and removed any items that needed to dry out (like my floormats), I tried to start my car. I was hoping it was just going to be wet and maybe a little musty, but still drivable. Unfortunately, the car did not start. She turned over once and then stalled out, and then didn’t start again. Oh, no. I hoped it just needed more time to dry out.

In the meantime, I had to take care of the wet car. I went upstairs and picked up a stack of towels (these are my backup towels that I kept telling myself I needed to donate, but I am sure glad I didn’t!) I was able to soak up the standing water with the towels, but there was still the matter of the wet floorboards that really needed to be dried with a wet/dry vac so all that dampness didn’t become moldy. Thankfully, my stepdad came to the rescue! He had a wet/dry vac and was able to bring it over on Friday morning so I could dry out the car.

(My mom’s house fared just fine through the night. They had some flooding in the street and on their driveway, but it didn’t get into the house or garage. They had a lot of debris on their driveway to pick up, and my mom got, like, a dozen ant bites on her poor feet from all of that labor. They also never lost power, but were without Internet for most of Friday.)

When Robert was drying out the car, he decided to remove my trunk liner to see if any water had gotten into the spare tire well. And, you guys, thank goodness he thought of that! LOOK AT THIS:

That’s at least a few gallons of water in this well. Oy vey! I didn’t even think to look there, but with that much water in my trunk, we assumed parts of my engine were flooded with as much water, too. It’s not looking good for you, Gladys!

Anyway, we got the car dried out and then decided to let the engine dry off for a few more hours before I called a tow truck/filed an insurance claim (another silver lining: my car insurance covers flood damage!). So my mom, Robert, and I went out to lunch and then back to their house where I took a nap for a few hours. Much needed after not sleeping much the night before! Then it was back to my apartment to check on the car.

Still not working.

I filed an insurance claim and then called a tow truck to take away my sweet little lady. When the tow truck driver arrived, one of the first things he said to me was, “You know they’re gonna total this, right?” I knew things weren’t looking great for Gladys, but it made me surprisingly emotional to think about that! I didn’t want Gladys to be totaled, I don’t want to go through the rigamarole of insurance totaling my car, I don’t want to buy a new car. I just wanted to turn back time, parked Gladys in a parking garage (which I could have done for free at my mom’s work; it makes me so angry at myself that I didn’t think of that!), and not have to worry about all of this nonsense.

Today, the Kia dealership where Gladys is at for the time being called me to say that they received the car but are pretty sure that insurance will have it totaled since it likely got flooded with saltwater and floodwater filled with chemicals and bacteria. Apparently, all of that isn’t great for car engines! Who knew?! They have had a huge influx of cars from this storm (hundreds!) and it’s going to take them a while to get through all of them. The likelihood is that I find out sometime late next week or early the following week what the status is and my next steps. For the time being, I am without a car, which isn’t fun. I’m trying my best to avoid getting a rental car because insurance won’t cover that 100% and I don’t need to be spending more money at this point in time.

What’s more, I’m staying with my mom until my power comes back. I hate being away from my cats and I worry about them being in a warm apartment (I mean, warm by my standards. Some people consider a 78-degree home to be the perfect temperature!). But at least I love being with my mom, so staying with her isn’t a huge inconvenience! She has a spare room that I can use and I get copious amounts of doggie love. I’m hoping to be back home and in my normal routine by Monday, but we’ll see.

I also consider myself very fortunate that my biggest concern is my car. I have the resources to deal with this, and it will hopefully not be a huge financial burden. It’s just going to be a bit stress-inducing for the time being. My home is fine. My cats are fine. My family and friends are fine. There are people in my city who lost everything. Some people were stuck on the roofs of their houses because the water in their homes rose to such a catastrophic level. Two of my friends are dealing with extreme storm damage at their homes, with damaged floors and furniture and appliances. And right now, I have friends offering to drive me places and pick up things for me. I have my mom and stepdad who dropped everything to help me. I am so lucky in so many ways.

I may be a bit sporadic in the blogging world for the next few weeks while I figure things out. I’ll try to pop in here when I can!