Author: Joey deVilla

As I write this (8:10 p.m. EDT), Milton is minutes away from making landfall, but the rain is coming down hard here in Old Seminole Heights. There were a couple of “thunks” on the roof, but I know those sounds — small branches from our live oaks landing on the roof.

Here’s the latest image from the front door camera:

There’s a lot of water on the street, but our neighborhood has those old-school high granite curbs, and the street beside us (we’re on a corner lot) is a very handy canal for excess water, with a slope that leads down to the Hillsborough River about three blocks away.

The rain’s coming down hard and loud on the roof, but this old house appears to be holding up well.

More updates soon!

Ice doesn’t last that long in a cooler, so deciding when to get ice to keep food fresh in the event of a hurricane blackout is an exercise in timing.

The nearby Kwik Stop announced on our neighborhood Facebook group that they’d be open, so they were the first place I went. Unfortunately, they’d sold all their ice yesterday, but it gave me a chance to enjoy the decorative taping done by the neighboring shop:

I appreciate that they’ve embraced their Florida vape-ness:

There was a good chance that Kwik Stop would fail me in my quest for ice, but that’s why I had plans B, C, E, F, and G in place*. Plan B was enough — good ol’ reliable Florida Drive-In, where you don’t have to leave your car (or often in my case, bike) to shop:

I got my ice, took this selfie for the record, and then headed home to finish hurricane prep:

(Some of you may be wondering why there’s no plan D. That’s because that one has a flaw. Plan D is not a sane plan, or to put it simply: D’s nuts.)

Here’s the overhead view of Hurricane Milton as seen from weather radar at 2:44 p.m. Eastern (UTC-4). As you’ve probably heard, Milton is HUGE:

The hurricane’s still hours away from landfall, so the weather, as seen through our security cameras, doesn’t look bad…yet.

The cameras are now our eyes and ears outside because the view from our windows is completely blocked. Despite how it sounds, that’s a good thing — it means we’ve deployed the “hurricane kevlar,” as we call it:

We used to have 1/2″ and 3/4″ plywood sheets with pre-drilled holes that we’d slip onto bolts sticking out of our window frames when a hurricane came. The bolts weren’t the most aesthetically-pleasing thing, and the plywood took a lot of storage space and was a real pain to set up and tear down.

A couple of hurricane seasons ago, we’d decided that we’d had enough of the plywood approach and started looking at other hurricane-proofing solutions for the windows and went with hurricane fabric: impact-resistant panels with mounting brackets held in place by screws going into holes embedded in the window frame or wall. During non-hurricane times, plastic plugs go into the screw holes.

We have a panel for every window in the house, and the whole set fits in a closet. It would take me a whole afternoon (and ideally, another person to assist) to cover the windows the old plywood way; I can now do the job solo in about an hour with the panels.

Here’s a demo of hurricane fabric in action:

Unpleasant as the replacement costs would be, you consider your windows expendable in hurricane country. What you really want is something that will prevent hurricane projectiles from entering your house (and more gravely, entering you.) We’re counting on the hurricane fabric’s combination of strength and “give” to deflect whatever the cat 3 or cat 4 winds decided to hurl chez nous.

I’ll report back if anything interesting happens.