The price of gaming in the sub-tropics.

Just noticed I still have PoE running in the background to the WDC realm. Been AFK all afternoon and haven't been DC'ed out. Amazing or more likely after the 1st month of FoO the total volume of players on-line simultaneously is dropping off and the servers are not being stressed to the max any more. Sunday afternoon is normally the peak players according to Steam Charts.

Oh yes... this is the 57th anniversary of hurricane Donna in 1960 (CAT2).

This is the price I pay for living in paradise 7 months of the year. At least it will never snow.

my childhood house is in Miami about 3 miles or so from the beach. I remember gathering and spending many hurricanes at an uncle's mansion. the whole family would gather there each year as we had the hurricanes. we'd run out in the eye of the storm toss the Frisbee around (it was a golf course) and rain would sting us like nails. lol.

I bet my old house must be flooded if not torn apart. This hurricane Irma is something from another planet.

Clean up is going to take months ... they still haven't cleaned up everything from when Katrina hit 10+ years ago.

I'm back on the Internet. Super intense winds sustained around 100 mph gusting to over 110. Office for hurricane Charlie was 1st floor with a limited view. Irma I'm on the 4th floor with fantastic view of downtown Fort Myers looking NNW over to the river. Wow, such wind intensity for over 2 hours the likes of which I've never seen! First from left to right (coming from E then NE) and later left to right as the eye pasted to our east a few miles. The back side rain was driving hard against the windows and leaking in and we all had towels and buckets to soak up the water before it could run off the window sills and damage anything. I worked for an hour but we persevered and prevented water damage but I'm physically drained. Power was out for all of 30 secs. here but 2/3 of our county is without power. That's one of the 2 main reasons our data center is here, the power rarely fails and we're on the 4th floor of a 1923 constructed steel building that feels like a bunker (rock hard non-sheetrock walls... not sure what building materials were used in 1923 but it's harder to drill than cement block).

When the power went off I just left my gaming rig off until it blew through. One of my business partners got some awesome video at the initial eye-wall passage (lasted about 45 minutes) and then again when the wind shifted to the NNW and I was trying to stop the window flooding for an hour. Never experienced a 4th floor view of nature's full fury like that ever. At least it wasn't like some of the Leeward islands that were near 100% wiped out with 180 sustained and gusts to 200 mph. Thank whoever or whatever for it riding along the north coast of Cuba to slow it down to CAT 3 speed and then turning north to come onshore at Marco Island so it was over land about 3 hours more to slow it down even further. But when the bridges get inspected and I'm allowed to drive back over to Cape Coral I hope I have a home left to live in.

Too stressed out to sleep. Maybe I'll play a few easy maps to take my mind off of the whole disaster. Last night I found an old Rock Hudson movie Ice Station Zebra I hadn't seen in decades and watched it. Then I ran the Zana dailies on my Harbinger Scorching Ray CWC Firestorm Berserker and a FoO respec'd SC Glacier Cascade Mine and Ice Trapper Saboteur. My build for the FoO Harbinger trio party play is a Totem FrostBolt Hierophant and is also fun to play but it's early going so no totems yet just Freeze Pulse + self casting FrostBolt until leveled enough.