9/11/01

Sitting at my desk that Tuesday morning in September I was speaking to a family member about the cost of private home health aides for her beloved mother….She commented that her son had just mentioned that a plane had hit a building in New York….My first thought was that a small private plane had had a terrible miscalculation and crashed only later to learn the terrible truth….

At the same time the towers were burning we here in Sarasota were dealing with our own imminent peril…TS Gabrielle was inching in on us from the Gulf waters  so by Friday  the 14th we were home under hurricane alert, we had enacted our office disaster plan, all our patients and caregivers had been notified.  The special needs patients had been picked up and we were all left to our own devices to wait out fickle Gabrielle…

I think I had previously written about this, but it might have been one of the entries lost when we got hacked/chopped back then…here on Open Diary.  No, I think that was only last year…oh well, forgive me,  my memory fails me sometimes….

Anyway here we were watching New York and the little weather box in the corner of the TV kept flashing the latest.  Stanley kept going outside watching the wind as it blew around and around….We were finally notified that Gabrielle made landfall in Venice FL…I am up the road from there….and we had 73mph winds….1 mile short of a category 1 storm….We had $2200.00 to our home and garage from tree damage…I can not imagine…a category 3 or 4 storm… My heart goes out to all the people when I see so much damage in AL, LA, MS…..

We watched a documentary last night about the storm season of 2004…..I was up the road 34 miles from Charleys impact but we sufferred only slight wind changes.  It seemed the windows were boarded up for 4 months last year….. we burned a lot of candles because we were concerned we would need our battery lights for important thinks.  If we had to get back to work or something….I never take for granted how fortunate we all were here in Sarasota in the last 13 years that we have lived here….

Most of the problems we have had in the past year have been not weather or financial but family and emotional.  But today I count my blessings and say thanks for my good health.  Sometimes the stories seem so long and whinny that I prefer to just keep them inside….even though…I know I would heal faster if I would write it all down…..but, that takes to much energy which I can’t seem to muster at this time….It is good to be back….