#Juniper blethers

[junipernight]

Kitty boy is helping

He is not, he is hindering So helpful <3

[mochuelita]

Inktober 2017: Divided/The Lost Children

[junipernight]

*Inhale*

The hurricane snacks are for when the power goes out, the hurricane snacks are for when the power goes out, save the snacks for when-

[junipernight]

I'm making Hurricane Milton do something useful when he comes (water in my new wildflowers) :P

[junipernight]

omg you work in conservation/restoration?? that's so cool!!!!!

Yep! It's definitely an interesting field to work in.

I am not sure what else to say, but I have a sporadically updated sideblog about it if you're interested: @boggedybloggedy

[junipernight]

Times I've drawn the faces of characters in the Dawn/Legacy of Yangchen novels:

Avatar Yangchen: 20

Kavik: 0

Mistress Guaba, the maid who's in literally one scene: 6

[junipernight]

Cons to being the only person in the office today: It is lonely and quiet and I don't want to do anything :(

Pros to being the only person in the office today: I can sing World is Mine while I wait for the coffee to brew >:)

[junipernight]

Me: Wow, following tags for small fandoms I like is great! I should do this with some of my old favorite rare pairs!

The rarepair tag: Has nothing new in it since a painting I did in 2021

[junipernight]

I was walking around earlier, and I saw a signpost that was obviously missing it's sign, so I assumed that the sign had blown away during the hurricanes. This would be a very logical thing to assume, because many signs around town are still missing or damaged post-hurricanes, except. the empty signpost and I were inside a Walmart.

[junipernight]

Well, I won't know "the weight of water," but I will certainly know the patience of it 😅 We are STILL on a boil water advisory, and will remain so until at least Wednesday.

[junipernight]

Round 4 I guess

[junipernight]

Things that will make you want to give up your physical possessions:

Moving

Hurricanes

The Avatar Yangchen novels

[junipernight]

I stopped liveblogging Hurricane Milton somewhere around the eye, because there was too much going on, but I do want to write it down for my own sake, so here we go:

______________________________________________________

So the eye had come and gone. My wind chimes began to chime again, heralding the return of the wind, and soon the storm was as strong as it had been before, shrieking through the trees and making deep bass noises as it pushed against our apartment building.

We'd been spared the worst of the noise during the first part of the storm, because the wind had been buffeting the opposite side of the building, blowing from SE. The wind had been so strong then that it blew the rain into my neighbors' apartments in a steady stream around the edges of their tightly closed windows and doors. Now, the wind had shifted to come from the NW, and was forcing its way around our doors.

There was an ominous scraping noise. It was completely dark outside the window — no moon, no stars, no streetlights, only the sporadic green flare of exploding transformers. Inside the apartment wasn't much brighter. We couldn't see what was causing the sound, but Little Sister thought maybe the patio screen had been ripped off, staple by staple. The wind got louder and louder. A frantic knocking sounded at the door — it was our upstairs neighbor Bea and her eight-week-old puppy.

We ushered her in. She was apologetic about coming, but said she had wanted to get downstairs because "the wind was starting to sound tornado-y." I was glad she'd come, because I'd offered our downstairs apartment as a tornado shelter before, and also because the conversation was a welcome distraction from the wind. Sister was glad she'd come because she likes puppies. We talked and watched the transformers blow up for a while. There were so many of them... it was a little like that scene in Lilo and Stitch, when Stitch crash lands and the sky pulses with green light and Lilo thinks it's a shooting star. It was like a hundred experiment 626's crash-landed on Earth that night.

Something went Boom! and shook the building.

I was sure a tree had fallen on something or someone. We ran into the hall to see if everyone was okay. Almost everyone else was in the hall too, trying to figure out what caused the boom. One neighbor wasn't answering her door. She's an older lady, and she's starting to have some memory problems. She seemed the most nervous about the storm. We knocked on her door multiple times. I was afraid that maybe she'd had a medical emergency in there, but I couldn't just break into my neighbor's apartment to see if she'd had a heart attack or been squished by an oak tree or something. Another neighbor, Tea thought maybe Elder Neighbor was asleep and decided to text her.

Bea was worried because when she'd grabbed the puppy and ran, she’d been in such a hurry that she'd forgotten to blow out her candles, and she didn't want to leave live fire unattended with cats. I asked if she wanted to bring the cats down too, but she said they were hiding and we probably wouldn't be able to get them out. She also apparently had a fish tank she'd left on her balcony, tucked behind a wall, that she no longer thought was safe.

Was I incredulous that Bea had left anything, let alone living creatures, outside during a hurricane? Yes. Do I think this was irresponsible? Yes. But Bea had just driven home from Georgia the day before and was taking care of a new 8-week-old, so I’m trying not to judge.

So me, Bea, Little Sister and Baby Puppy all climb the stairs to Bea's apartment, carrying flashlights and solar lanterns, and then Bea does the unthinkable. She does the thing you're not supposed to do.

She opens a door during a hurricane.

She slides open the sliding glass door to her balcony in the middle of the eyewall, and goes outside to grab her fishtank.

Earlier that day, I had learned about a different neighbor, in a different building, during a different hurricane, who once opened a door into the storm; the wind ripped the door off it's hinges and put it in a tree.

Bea goes out into the hurricane, picks up her fish tank, and carries it in, while my sister and I stand ready to slide the door shut the moment she's back inside. And we do shut it, but this stupid balcony curtain is in the way, and it's blocking the latch. We have to crack open the door again and again, and try to push the curtain back out, but the wind is a sustained 80mph, and even with both of us we cannot force the curtain to stay outside, so we get it away from the latch and slam the door shut with half the curtain poking through. But it latches, so that's that.

That’s about when the gutter finally snapped free of it's moorings, and started flapping around outside Bea's balcony like a 40 foot metal kite. I took a picture, Bea blew out her candles, and we went back down to my unit.

The partially-ripped-off gutter was long enough to be seen from my floor, so we sat in the living room and watched the gutter flap and the transformers blow for a while, all the while hoping the gutter wouldn’t punch a hole in either someone’s windshield or my patio door. Eventually, Bea decided that the wind had gone down enough, and she went home.

I kept watching the window from the couch, and Little Sister did the same from the floor, where she was soothing her pets: Cat did not like being in the carrier one bit. Rabbit was eating hay like it was just another Wednesday. The gutter broke away and disappeared.

More transformers lit up the horizon, mostly green, some purple. One transformer was very very close when it blew out, somewhere behind us; it didn’t just light the sky, it temporarily illuminated all the other buildings in the apartment. The gutter blew back towards us, dragging along the sidewalk. It went back and forth several times before being caught underneath some cars in the parking lot.

Another transformer blew, and this one was different. This one was orange. This one didn’t go out after a few seconds, or half a minute tops. This orange glow on the horizon flickered.

Something was on fire. Something close. Across the street, maybe.

We were in the south side of the storm at this point, which for Hurricane Milton happened to be the dry side. So it was very windy and relatively dry and something was on fire.

We couldn’t go outside to see, and even if we called someone, no emergency departments would be responding to anything for several hours, so we just watched to see if it would spread.

Whatever was on fire stopped being on fire. Hallelujah.

The wind was still fucken wimdy, but I was dead tired at this point. It was sometime past midnight. Little Sister was staying up with the animals until she felt safe to let them out of their carriers, so we agreed that she would keep watch, and when she was ready to sleep, if things still seemed dangerous she would wake me up.

That’s more or less it. The winds died down. The sun rose.

Me, my sister, and all our neighbors all went outside at about the same time, dawn, to look at the damage. By 7:30, we’d cleared all the branches from the entry road, in time for the first evacuee to return home.

(Eldest neighbor was fine; she was sleeping. I still don’t know how she slept through all that.)

[junipernight]

Today's weather forecast was, "It's safe to put up Halloween decorations now"😂

No more hurricanes between now and the end of October!

[junipernight]

It's fall, y'all🍂🍁

[junipernight]

We have running water again :D

Still under a boil advisory, but that's okay.