Well, that's it. It's no longer safe to go outdoors. The electicity's gone as well. Which means that if you're reading this, you're doing so sometime after power was restored and I was able to actually upload this to the website...which could be awhile from now. Hurricane Charley has officially arrived and announced its intentions in no uncertain terms.
And at this point, it's just me, my PowerBook, and my iPod. Thank goodness for Apple technology, eh?
I have two PowerBook batteries, and I'm holding the second one in reserve, but I figure there's no harm in using up the first one to go ahead and do a bit of writing. It's not as if there's much else to do around here, except to look out the window and watch tree branches land in the yard. Some of them are coming from our trees. Others are blowing in from parts unknown. Every once in awhile, the entire sky lights up in a bizarre shade of green. Yeah, you read that right: green.
I've read about people using their iPod to navigate through the dark in a power outage, but I can now confirm first-hand that it really is an ideal tool for the job. As opposed to a flashlight, which never disperses its light to as wide of an area as you'd like it to, the iPod actually casts a uniform glow across the room in front of you. And because of that, it's actually one of the reasons that I want to keep my second PowerBook battery in reserve: so that when the time comes, I can recharge the iPod (ain't Apple technology great?)
And yes, my iPod still gets the full eight hours of battery life, as advertised. But with the way I'm misusing the backlight, along with the fact that I'm listening to it while I type, I don't quite know just how many hours I'll actually get out of it (putting a single song on "repeat" is the single best way to milk the battery for more than it's supposed to be worth).
You see, we're in no serious danger here in St. Cloud, because we're about 40 miles inland from the east coast, and about 50 miles inland from the west coast. Lucky for us, a hurricane begins deteriorating the moment it reaches land, so what we're getting here is merely a fraction of what the folks in coastal places like Fort Myers got earlier today. But still, two panes of the front screen porch have blown in, and the trees in the back yard are already a mess.
My brother-in-law briefly snuck out on the back porch a few minutes ago with his digital camcorder, and captured some footage that we'll likely turn into an iMovie later on (ain't Apple technology great?). Of course, as dark as it is, filming anything was difficult...until we realized that the iPod works well as a backlight for filming purposes as well (ain't Apple technology great?).
If I have time. not that I seem to have much time for anything non-essential anymore, but if I do, I'll export some portion of the iMovie to QuickTime (ain't Apple technology great?), and post it to this site. If you've never seen wind like this, it's something else altogether.
Because it's so dark here in the house and I'm only working by candlelight, I can actually get away with putting my PowerBook's screen on the very lowest brightness setting, which will allow me to milk its battery all it's worth as well (ain't Apple technology great?).
Well, I suppose I should take a break for now, and go watch the sky for awhile in the hopes of determining just what could possibly be causing the flashes of green. Perhaps I'll come back and write some more this evening. Because, beyond listening to my iPod, there ain't much else to do around here.
Except to sit here and wait it out. And to be thankful that we're not getting the worst of it.
