Work Work Work...Rescue Rescue Rescue...

It's now two weeks since Wilma hit.

Walter came down a few days after the storm, and left yesterday morning.

We have our water, power, cell phones, and one of two land lines restored.

I have perishables. Fresh milk is available again. Finally, finally. The gas lines are gone too. Did you see them? Some were more than 3 miles long. One guy I talked to was in line for 10 1/2 hours. He needed fuel for his generator. When he finally got to the top of the line, with only 7 cars ahead of him, the gas station ran out of fuel.

Smaller plants like my triangle palm and a mini-dragon are back up and nicely staked via Walter. He's great at that. The huge volume of pruning and vegetation clearing is largely complete, but at that, there's still a lot to do.

The 20-foot queen palm is off the roof and standing upright again. This was an exciting operation, whereby we used Walter's semi - the tractor, or "truck" part - to pull her up. (don't worry, pics to come!) She's naked. Defronded. But she's up.

The orchid tree will survive, too, but unfortunately had to get decapitated. This is a popular lazy-ass pruning style that fills me with scorn, that should only be used when strictly necessary. It was. All my careful pruning and shaping over the years, the beautiful structure, is gone. The queen palm split the trunk and all major branches when it fell. It used to shade my house. Now it's around 5 feet tall, just naked trunk, no leaves.

The roof is amazingly intact. No leaks at the last big rain. There's some damage, but considering what almost happened, our roof dodged a bullet. When the queen palm came down, it did it so slowly and gently, it just delicately laid its fronds on the roof. The orchid tree under it caused all the dents and scrapes.

The window that blew out in my home office still has its plexiglass, and Walter duly admired the skill of my work, especially under hurricane conditions. Good man! Two other windows were blown out. One was by the cat pans. It's now boarded. The last was on the west side. A huge armoire in that room blocks it. Since boarding that window would take almost a day's work, and it's not a window the Bad Guys can enter, we're leaving it unboarded for now. (This is a long story involving drilling holes in concrete block.)

A board fence surrounds about 75% of my property. The fence almost all came down. The posts were snapped off at ground level, so simply propping them up is the best we can do for the present. Our friend and old neighbor Danny will be helping us with that, now that Walter's off again.

The inside of the house was crammed with things like porch furniture, hurricane supplies, and stuff for "fun" work to keep me happy should I have been housebound for several days by the storm. It's slowly being cleared out. A fair amount of furniture got water damage, and it's going out to the side of the street, to join all the other huge piles of debris. Lucky for us, it was all stuff we weren't so fond of.

Between all the work Walter missed, and those hurricane expenses, we're broke as can be. The only good part is that people understand when hurricanes hit, they hit your wallet too. Financially, yes, I'm scared. I take deep breaths and deal with it as best I can.

Next week is my time for doing claims: house insurance, car insurance, FEMA, what have you. When Walter was here the time was so precious I put it off until after he was gone. It's also true that the adjusters are going up their learning curve, there's more power so more offices are open, and the whole process will go much more smoothly for me now.

Work work work. The amount of work to be done after a major disaster is staggering.

Since I'm built for emergencies, and have the dubious advantage of living a hurricane-prep life because of my health problems, this sort of thing doesn't depress me the way it does other people. Still and all, sometimes I need to get away from it.

So I'm also doing plant rescues.

Every street is covered with head-high debris piles. Vegetation goes in a separate pile to get hauled off to the chippers. Here's where k comes in. I find things like plumeria that's easy to root, or whole plants people are throwing away in general disgust, and load them into my Saturn and bring them home. I know I can't TLC all of them back to life. But even if I can only save 50%, the fact remains that 100% of the unrescued plants will die. We lost our canopy, so many trees, so very much of our Green. We need plants just now, all of us.

And it's a wonderful boost, an emotional diversion, from the work around the house.

I'm very tired. I'm covered with bruises and cuts and insignificant fractures and weird little infections, tiny fang marks from spiders and centipedes, fingernails split to the quick. Skin burns from the poisonous sap of Euphorbia lactea. MRSA invades so many of these that every night I go to bed with around 30 bandaids holding down the Silvadene I slather on them, and I'm greasy all over from the wounds I just cream but don't bandaid. My bandaid needs break my budget like nobody's business.

It's worth it. Ever so.