Hurricane Ian and my parents home

 My parents have been in a nice retirement community for a few years now and this isn't the first hurricane but it is the only one that did significant damage to their home.  Total loss..  

Both my parents and my family are blessed though - no one was hurt and God takes care of the needs. 

I'm very happy we have enough space for them to move in and store many of their belongings while they work through the insurance and wait for a new home.  It is estimated as a good number of months before it will be ready.  It is hard to say if there will be other delays - there are so many people needing replacements now.

It was much different seeing their pictures compared to us being their when I took these. These are after a couple weeks so the roads were clear of debris and the water had receded from the roads we use to get there.

These are from a golf cart on our way to their house in the community.

The devastation was hard to comprehend at this scale.  Tornadoes tear up homes but that is usually in a path you can follow and it may skip areas a bit.  This was just destruction everywhere.  Not every home was a total loss but many were and most others had damage to some extent. 

This is what we found when we got to my parents home.

These next 2 pictures are of what used to be part of the lanai. Roof and most walls gone.  A refrigerator was tossed out in the yard. 

Something like 2/3 of the roof was gone - it was now "brighter inside" but mosquitoes were starting to multiply and lack of electric or any chance of usable air conditioning makes cleanup even harder. I can't say that the smell of wet insulation improves with time. There was some humor though as a few containers in awkward places were full of water - my wife can attest to that!  I was fortunate to not drop the container of fishing weights and water - but I did tell my parents that it made up for them helping me move many heavy books between homes over the years! I probably am off a bit on that - I'm sure they still moved more books than I moved wet fishing stuff.

It is in God's hands and nothing else matters.

Romans 15:13

13 May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

  Jeremiah 10:12-13

12 But God made the earth by his power; he founded the world by his wisdom and stretched out the heavens by his understanding.

13 When he thunders, the waters in the heavens roar; he makes clouds rise from the ends of the earth. He sends lightning with the rain and brings out the wind from his storehouses.

Psalms 71:18

18 Even when I am old and gray, do not forsake me, my God, till I declare your power to the next generation, your mighty acts to all who are to come.

My book case - Non-IT

Ok, this post documents most of the remaining books on the book shelves.  The content mainly covers Christianity, Home/Repair, Metal working, Gardening, Mat and Science.

Here is a link to my previous post covering my IT related books.

I'm not going to document all the magazines and the remaining books - a combination of family "fun reads", cook books and other miscellany.

Here is my bible (I find the "New American Standard Bible" pretty easy to read) and a few other books we have.  One nice thing about God is that God doesn't need to change - one book tells it all. Oh, we do have other books because I like to understand historical context, etc at times as well.  For better or worse, I don't think I could ever consider myself a bible scholar though.  I find myself having to read a lot more IT technical books to keep up with the changing times.

Here are other Christianity related books on the other side of the bookcase. Most of these are my wife's.

I had a brief plan to do a bit of a career change from general IT into Bioinformatics but decided that the combination of a time consuming primary job along with the need to spend quality time with my family outweighed my desire for change.  On a different note, when studying material like this I find it hard *not to see* God's handiwork. 

For as many barn/shed books as I ended up with (cleaned out my fathers stash when they moved a while back... I couldn't say no), I should have built the workshop I planned.  Maybe after we get moved.. I found most of the deck books either had overly fancy projects or didn't really meet current construction codes - googling for stuff kept me code compliant but you still have to double check things.  The books on electricity and concrete work helped me out with a couple projects.

Here are a bunch of my "hobby" books.  I will say that I am hugely impressed with how much raw data is crammed into the "Machinery's Handbook" - it is purely a reference but helpful too in a sort of "find what you don't know" kind of way.  At some point, I would still love to build a CNC router and maybe work with some milling, cutting, plasma cutting type tools.

 Most of these math books are related to my math minor.  The more "business statistics" related books are my wife's.  On a rare occasion I pull one of these out because I want to remember how to solve some problem or another.  I had hoped my son might read these a little bit (he does like math) but these just don't have the draw of his fun reading or drawing activities.

 The physics are from my undergrad degree and the others are actually text books I got from my dad when they moved.  The old books are dated technology wise but still have some interesting things here and there.  It is kind of interesting to see the difference in writing styles between ~1960's text books and technical writing today.  The old text books are a bit dry in style but I have to wonder if the "easier reading style" nowadays isn't required because everyones attention span is so low. I did laugh at some article indicating that the average adult has around an 8 second attention span while a gold fish has a 9 second attention span.

Here is the last of the stuff I care to document. phew.  I do like gardening and hope I will still again have time to do some once I find an appropriate job and relocate as desired.

I hope you find something enjoyable out of all this.  Thanks for reading!
Scott

Proverbs 18:15
15 The heart of the discerning acquires knowledge, for the ears of the wise seek it out.

The field of Hammers

You and two friends are wandering through the countryside and run across a field of hammers.  One of you says "Amazing that hammers can grow!", another says "Who put the hammers here and why?  It is silly." and the last one just gives thanks for the artist even if they don't understand the creation.

Which one are you?

If you don't know the purpose of this then ask the creator.  If you don't like the purpose of this then take it to the original author of the inspiration. :)

Everyone has faith; it is a matter of what or whom you have faith in.