Well, We Found the ER!

We woke up at 2am to a horrible goose-honking sound that even the multiple ceiling fans and air purifiers couldn't dampen. Isabelle was frantically trying to catch her breath and getting agitated, upset and scared. As were Ed and I!

Rewind 3 days to the forecast of a Hurricane Isaac heading towards Tampa as a Category 1 Hurricane and we hit the toy aisle when we did our Walmart run to build our emergency kit. We got a new board game (Trouble, a classic fave of mine) and a Princess Lego set for Izzi and Ed to work on.

Last night, when I heard the goose-honk and heard the stridor as she tried to catch her breath, I feared the worse. She had inhaled one of the impossibly teeny tiny itty bitty Lego pieces. She's almost FIVE for pete's sake, she KNOWS better than to put things in her mouth. But my mind went wild, maybe she was trying to separate two Legos and used her mouth? The set was a house, pool, grill, playground, etc. Maybe she was pretending to eat the food off the grill? (Which are these tiny little hamburgers smaller than your pinky nail).

Long story short, there was no inhalation. Whew!!! She has a virus (heard THAT one before) and the croup. No fever so she can go back to school but I kept her home today to keep an eye on her. She's more than fine, she's been the normal crazy lunatic all day that she always is.

At 3am, when we decided to play it safe and go to the hospital, we had NO CLUE where to go or how to get there. Thank goodness for GPS. We punched in the name of the place where Ed's grandmom Isabelle used to go and found our way there. It was very nice. The people were nice, they were quick and we were out of there in about an hour. Researching ERs was on my list of things to do when we moved here. I just hadn't gotten around to it. Hopefully they are in network on my insurance plan, ho hum.

On a separate note, Hurricane Isaac totally missed us. We had a little rain and wind, too many tornado warnings for my liking but no real problems. So lucky! Unfortunately for the residents on the Gulf Coast, Isaac wasn't so kind to them. On the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, it looks like we'll have another retired Hurricane name.

God Be With You, LA, MS, and AL folks...

Debby Downer

I joked as we left Maryland to move to Florida because the Tampa area hasn’t seen a tropical storm or hurricane in a really long time. That meant we were sure to see one this coming hurricane season since the Siler’s were moving there.

We haven’t even made it safely out of the first month of hurricane season and here we are with Tropical Storm Debby. This has been a weird one, none of the storm guys knew which way she was going to track. Some had her going towards Texas, some had her hitting N’awlins, some had them going to the panhandle, and some models had them coming straight for central west coast where Tampa lies.

We haven’t had much wind today here at the house but the yard and the golf course are totally flooded. There are many road closures, trees down, power lines down, and other damage that is just starting to get reported on the local news stations.

We haven’t left the house all day, in fact, I’m still in my pajamas at 9pm. The scariest part of today has been the multiple tornado reports and warnings. It’s kept me on my toes, trying to figure out where I will drag my family if Mr. Jim Cantore tells me to seek an interior room in my home. I don’t have a home. I’m in someone else’s house. And we have no basement or interior room.

The odd thing is, we haven’t “heard” the rain or minimal wind gusts all day. This house is a concrete block of architectural wonder. If we had a storm like this in our home in Edgewater, I would have evacuated already. You can’t hear rain on the roof. You can’t “feel” the house shake with the wind. And we’ve had zero water issues all day (from below, above, or anywhere in between). Granted the yard is totally flooded and the pool overflowed. Pop-Pop Bill has been out there draining water out of it a few times today. But the difference between a very old wooden beach bungalow and a Florida concrete-block newer home is pretty awesome.

And now that Tampa has had a pretty significant storm hit (we got the eastern side of Debby which has delivered almost an entire FOOT of rain), I’m just thinking that we are now safe from any head-on deluge for many years to come.

Debby, you’re going down…