http://www.ComputerBob.com/journal_archive/2004/09.php .
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Today, I added a new Abuse Information section to this Web site, to try to provide helpful information to victims of domestic abuse. Right now, Abuse Information contains only the two documents that I mentioned in the past few days:
but I hope to add many more in the future.
For a number of reasons, starting today, I will no longer refer to "the abuse victim that my wife and I are helping." Instead,
I will refer to her as "our houseguest." So, from now on, when you see a reference to "our houseguest" here, you'll know who it's
talking about.
Today, Hurricane Jeanne brought us 76 mile-per-hour winds and several inches of rain. With our house completely boarded up, my wife, the abuse victim that we're helping, and I barely even heard the wind and rain outside. We spent the whole day watching TV, reading, taking naps, playing with our pets, eating, and talking to concerned loved ones on the phone. As of this writing, news reports say there are about 1.6 million Floridians without electricity. Our power went off and back on at least a dozen times over the past several hours, but our longest outage was less than one minute. There's flooding all over the state, but just like in past hurricanes, we stayed high and dry in our little fortress. The hurricane has moved far enough north that we're now out of its most powerful bands of wind and rain, so the weather here should improve from now on. A little while ago, I went outside to take a quick look around our house and up and down the street. Except for monsoon-like wind and rain, and some small branches littering everyone's yards, everything looked pretty normal. Even little Angelo D'Tangelo (see June 23-26) made it through the storm unscathed. Hallelujah!
Yesterday afternoon, I finished building my plywood storage platform, but I suspect that it may be a long time before I'll
feel safe enough to remove the plywood from our house and store it.
Oh, those crazy hurricanes. After meandering in a big circle in the Atlantic for several days, Hurricane Jeanne now appears to be on its way to the Sunshine State, with its predicted path putting it on our eastern coast some time tomorrow or Sunday. Two days ago, I took the plywood off of just our front door and front picture window. Today, I put it back on, so we're all sealed up again.
I've been building a heavy-duty, permanent outdoor platform to store all of my plywood sheets between hurricane seasons. I designed it myself, using seven 4-foot-long, 4x4-inch posts of green-treated lumber, set 14-inches-deep into concrete, and holding up a 4x8-foot framework, constructed of 2x6-inch green-treated boards. I'm putting it on the far side of our house, in an unused, 9-foot-wide strip of our lot that's out of the way and all fenced-in. It's been a lot of work, but my new platform should last the rest of our lives. I'll probably finish it in a few days, and maybe I'll post a photo of it here in the future.
The abuse victim that my wife and I are helping is happy, healthy, and doing really well. Several days ago, our local police
told the victim that, because of her age, the State of Florida considers her abuser's recent physical violence against her
to be a felony. The local police also called the abuser and told him that if he ever returns to the Sunshine State, he will be
arrested. A few days later, the victim received a note in the mail from the abuser, who had used a marking pen and very large
capital letters to express his anger that the victim had reported his abuse to the police. Please read
I Got Flowers Today!, a short but very moving poem about
an abuse victim.
The abuse victim that my wife and I are helping is a Christian, so it's very fortunate that there's a women's shelter nearby that is sponsored by 80 local churches. When the victim went to that shelter's outreach organization the other day, she was interviewed, using a checklist that identified 17 signs exhibited by batterers. According to experts, most batterers exhibit between 3 and 5 of those 17 signs, and the more signs a person exhibits, the greater the potential for physical violence. In this victim's case, her abuser has exhibited 16 of the 17 signs.
Please read
Signs To Look For In A Battering Personality,
to help you recognize potential danger signs, both in your relationships and in the relationships of people that you know and
love.
Hurricane Ivan went past us today, but thankfully, it was far enough out in the Gulf of Mexico that it didn't affect us.
I spent most of the past several days, helping a loved one who is a victim of abuse, "board up her life" against the latest hurricane of emotional assault directed at her by her abuser. It's been very encouraging to see how many other loved ones have stepped forward, offering their love, encouragement, and support to the victim. Unfortunately, it's also been very discouraging to see that a few loved ones -- who know next to nothing about this situation, and who have shown absolutely no interest in learning how to help abuse victims -- have called to:
It's very frustrating to me to know that those are some of the exact same behaviors that the abuser has exhibited to the victim over the years.
The fact is that during the past few months that the victim has spent away from the abuser, she has
made all of her own decisions, probably for the first time in her life. All my wife and I have done is give the victim a safe
place to stay, help her find other sources of support and information, try to be supportive, try to be good listeners,
and try to encourage her to do what she decides is best. Anyone who does otherwise will make their opinions increasingly
irrelevant to the victim.
At 7:00 on Friday morning, I was at a local Home Depot store to buy a few more tools, and was shocked to see a line of about
32 people snaking throughout the store. Each person in line had an empty flatbed cart, and they were all waiting to buy sheets of
plywood to board up their homes or businesses. At the front of the line, the first person was lying on top of their cart,
listening to a
WalkMan. It turned out that the store was completely out of plywood and all of those people were waiting for a truck that was
supposed to deliver more plywood to the store later in the day. Late Friday afternoon, James and I finally finished boarding up
my house. By the time we boarded up the last 5 windows and the front door,
we had finally gotten really fast at doing it. I think our whole boarding-up job looks really professional, and even
though the plywood can be quickly and easily removed and reinstalled in the future, it is absolutely rock-solid. I will always be
grateful to James for his valuable help, and now I can relax a little, knowing that we've done the best we can do to protect both
of our families from future
hurricanes. Tonight, our TV news said that most local stores are completely out of plywood and won't have more until some time
next week. At the few stores that still have some, people are waiting in line up to 11 hours just to buy the 7/16-inch-thick
stuff, and the stores are limiting each purchase to only 10 sheets. Desperate people who can't find plywood are buying
extremely expensive sections of wooden fence, concrete floor panels, compressed paperboard, and even strips of aluminum siding,
to put over their windows. Right now, I'm feeling extremely fortunate that I found and
bought 20 sheets of expensive 3/4-inch-thick plywood this past Tuesday.
James and I worked on boarding up my house all day yesterday, and just about every single thing that could possibly go wrong,
went wrong. I'm sure that if anyone had been watching us, we would have looked like
Laurel and Hardy, but without any comedic
value. In fact, I wasted about 3 hours just driving to stores to buy replacements for faulty tools and parts that broke or got
lost in the yard as we worked, and I had to buy a new circular saw because the one that I had borrowed was too small and weak to
cut through 3/4" plywood. It took us 3 hours to install the first sheet of plywood, but by the time we stopped for the day, we
had installed 6 sheets. Several times, I got angry and frustrated about the tremendous effort, the huge expense, and all the
wasted time that this job is requiring, but James stayed calm and patient all day. We plan to start again at 8:00 this morning,
and we hope to finish installing the other 14 sheets today, despite the fact that it's threatening to rain all day. I sure hope
we finish the job soon, because
Hurricane Ivan
is predicted to be here in four days.
It took a long time and a lot of phone calls, but today, I found a Home Depot about 30 minutes north of us that had 50
sheets of very expensive, high-quality, 3/4-inch-thick, exterior-grade,
Plytanium
plywood. My former landlord, James, went with me in my brother-in-law Jim's pickup truck, to buy 20 sheets, which we stacked in
my garage. Tomorrow morning, James and I will start cutting plywood to fit over all of my dream house's windows and doors, and
we'll mount them with the PanelMate fasteners that I described a few days ago. During the next few days, we hope to turn my
dream house into a dream fortress that will stand up to any future hurricanes.
For the past 24 hours, we've had constant heavy rain with winds of up to 50 miles per hour. It's late-afternoon, and Frances is
finally out of the area, leaving a few remaining showers from its outermost circling bands, along with lots of flooding, scattered
damage, and many downed trees and power lines. Happily, we're still safe, high and dry, with hundreds of tiny twigs and branches
littering our yard. James and Cathy and their dogs went home awhile ago, and life is starting to settle back down to normal --
while we wait to see if
Hurricane Ivan is going to hit us next
weekend. Hopefully, I'll have our dream house all boarded up by then. The main problem will be finding plywood -- all of the local
stores are out of it, and none of them can tell me when they will get some more.
Hurricane Frances finally made landfall on the east coast overnight, and appears to be slowly weakening. Our
former landlords, James and Cathy, and their two dogs, Lulu and Shorty, are under a mandatory
evacuation from their mobile home, so they stayed overnight with us, and they'll stay here until the evacuation order is lifted.
It appears that Frances will get here later today, but it probably won't affect us much, other than bringing winds
of up to about 75 miles per hour, and several inches of rain.
It's been less than three weeks since Hurricane Charley threatened to wipe out the entire Gulf Coast of the Sunshine State. Now Hurricane Frances is on its way, threatening to hit the East Coast and then sweep a path of destruction across the state to the Gulf Coast. It's too late to board up our dream house before Frances arrives, but I just bought a couple hundred Textron PanelMate Plus Fasteners, so if we survive Hurricane Frances, I will permanently install them with removable sheets of 3/4-inch-thick plywood, and from then on, we'll be able to quickly board up the whole house any time a hurricane threatens us.
Here's a handy little household tip I just discovered: If you're ever washing the roasting pan after cooking a nice piece of
salmon, and you get a spot of salmon oil on the front of your white shirt, and you rub a few drops of dishwashing detergent into
the spot to remove it, don't lick your finger afterward.
