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These pictures certainly aren't artistic, but should be interesting. It had to happen sooner or later after moving to south Florida, and on Oct 24, 2005, I finally went through a hurricane after living here for 7 1/2 years, hurricane Wilma, with 100 mph wind and gusts to as high as 115 mph. So now I know what a hurricane is like. It's like, to make up for all the great weather here, we have YEARS worth of bad weather all compressed down to just a few hours -- resulting in some seriously *** BAD *** weather. Here are pictures I took out my windows during the hurricane:

This is looking out my front window the 1st half of the storm, before the eye, when the wind was hitting the front of my house. It looks like almost nighttime, but it was around 9 AM. Just to the upper right of the center of the picture is an indistinct dark patch that is a palm tree across the street, which later blew down, as I'll show. Just to the lower left of that is an orange tree on my front lawn. Those trees in the background and bushes in the foreground are just a blur from being whipped around in the wind, and indistinct due to the super-thick sheets of rain. (There's first a screened-in area outside my front door, with the door to that on the left, and the roof at the top.)

This was looking out my back window as the western horizon started brightening as the edge of the eye approached, at around 9:30 AM. But you can see from the blurry palm trees that the wind and rain were still full-force.

Now a few minutes later, in the southeastern edge of the eye, most of the sky had brightened, there was some slight clearing on the horizon, there was no rain, and the wind had calmed down to maybe just 50 mph, as opposed to 100 mph, as you can see from the much sharper image of the trees. The southeastern horizon remained dark from the edge of the eye, and the wind never died down completely because I wasn't too far into the eye. There was even a small patch of blue sky that came over at one point, but mostly the eye was a bright overcast.

Now around 10 AM, back out of the eye, the 2nd half of the storm, which seemed even fiercer than the 1st half, and went on at full force for 2 hours straight. The wind was now hitting this side of the house, and you can vaguely see a frond from a fishtail palm tree just outside the window whipping against the window on the left 2/3 of the picture, and the same palm trees as before in the background, through the super-thick sheets of rain, hitting the window almost like a fire hose. The wind was now slamming the window from straight on, with such force that rain was coming right through the tiny cracks between the panes. I could feel the whole house shake from the wind gusts, like a giant fist hitting it.

Between noon and 12:30, the hurricane ended amazingly abruptly, the rain ended, the wind died down to safe levels, and everyone went outside to survey the damage.

And now for the aftermath of the hurricane:

The fences blown down in the back yard.

A light pole and palm tree blown down right across the street from me, the same palm tree as I'd mentioned earlier.

My completely denuded papaya tree. See? We also have the trees lose their leaves in the fall, even in south Florida. During hurricanes, anyway. (It soon grew all its leaves back.)

2 trees down a few houses from me, obviously one before the eye came over, when the wind was blowing THAT way, the other after, when the wind was blowing THAT way.

Isn't that a pretty design? Kind of like abstract art. It's just a little sample of the mold on the walls in my mother's apartment, which was completely destroyed when the roofing material blew off and the rain poured in.

The eerie view looking through 7 apartments through a forest of metal poles, after the moldy walls were taken down, my mother's apartment somewhere off in the middle distance.

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