Trying to Reason with Hurricane Season...

...As Jimmy Buffett once said.

It's been a strange few days, but thankfully we're fine here in my part of South Florida. To the north of us in Palm Beach County there's a good deal of damage, but most of Broward County has come through relatively unscathed.

As for us, we have a toppled fence in our back yard to show for Frances' visit, and we lost our electricity for about 20 hours. Other than that, we suffered nothing worse than a little anxiety and a lot of splinters from cutting and hanging plywood.

For those who don't live in a hurricane area, it's hard to understand how completely a state can shut down when one of these things is zeroing in on you. All the local governments and businesses close at least a day in advance of it (this week, much of the county shut down on Wednesday evening), and all the television and radio stations switch to 24-hour coverage of the hurricane. The whole atmosphere is eerie and single-minded.

And afterwards, strangely, after the all-clear, there is a bit of an adrenalene let-down. At a certain point yesterday, it suddenly all ended. The TV and radio stations went back to normal, the stores all opened up, and it was over. But after three or four days of relentless focus on impending doom, it's odd to suddenly pick back up with work, meetings, baseball games, school, and leisure.

Hopefully we won't have to do it all again later this week with Ivan moving in.

Thanks for all of your thoughts and prayers for us over the past few days. Frances was approaching as a devastating category 4 hurricane, and suddenly downshifted to a 2. Your prayers were a part of that.