We're staying for Hurricane Irma

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Hurricane Irma prep for our back porch

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Today I spent hours cutting up 6'-by-8' wooden fences to make them fit and then set them up to cover the 4' tall windows on our back porch; with the wind expected to hit our house from that direction, those single-paned windows were the house's main structural weakness. Meanwhile Jen and the kids got a bunch of things ready indoors.
It's also worth noting that we have a cement brick house with almost all of the main windows rated to be able to cope with hurricane-force winds. Oh, and the roof was replaced this past March. So the house is in good shape.

With (Hurricane) Irma threatening a visit, we were looking all week trying to work out what to do. Should we bail at the first sign of it heading inland, or just hold on and wait through it?
We decided to wait until this evening if we were going to bail; with South Florida doing an official evacuation I was already hearing on Tuesday from coworkers in Atlanta that hotels were filling up. By the time we decided a hotel room might be worthwhile the closest we could find to accept us (with our pets) was in Virginia, 750 miles away; this would be 750 miles of bumper-to-bumper traffic which would balloon its normal 12 hour drive into 20 or 24 hours. At night. With two adults, three kids, three cats and a dog. This meant just running to a hotel wasn't such an easy decision.
Anyway, on Thursday evening the 5pm weather update suggested 90mph winds with gusts to 115mph because the eye was estimated to walk right over us. This obviously scared us quite a bit. But we didn't want to panic, especially when the alternative was the possible 24 hour, 750 mile drive.
The 11pm weather update had the storm starting to move west, which would save us from the full strength of the storm, and then this morning (Friday) the estimates put the eye fifty-ish miles west, leaving us with bare tropical storm winds.
So we're staying. We have a load of supplies, a BBQ grill to cook food if we loose power (which we expect to) and plenty of water. And a bunch of books to read. We'll be fine.

So. I'm in Florida.

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We found out yesterday afternoon that someone was living in our house in Sanford. We were planning to move back into it in two weeks, so this was news to us. After not being able to get ahold of the property manager who had been looking after our house for the past few years I called the local sheriff who sent out a deputy to investigate.

Some asshole somehow broke into our house and then "rented" it to a woman who was just days out of the hospital with a newborn baby. I say "somehow" because there were keys available but they were in a lockbox on one of the doors, so he either broke the lockbox or somehow found the code.

What makes things even more interesting is that he said his name was "Damien McKenna". It's some "white guy with glasses in his 50's" who gave an address in St Cloud, so obviously this prized example of Modern Man had done at least some research. The lease the lady signed just had his name, and another guy's name, but no business info - he said he was the owner.

So I'm in town to file a.. something.. at the sheriff's office and talk with the biggest victim in this whole ordeal - the lady who gave all her savings as a security deposit to rent my house.

Whee.

At the Women's March in Keene

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Me, carrying Kian, who's holding his sign upside down, while I wear #awesomewife's hat.
The crowd starting to gather.
Kian holding the sign upside down.
Kian finally holding the sign the right way.
The crowd building at the downtown square.
Part of the crowd from another side. A larger portion were in the middle of the square, which you can't really see from this angle.
Aidan holding the sign he made (which lots of people took pics of).
Liam holding his sign (right hand) and Kian's sign (left hand). Thanks to Sara Lowe-Bouchard for the photo. No, that's not my wife in the background.

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We dipped our toes into political activism today, joining the Women's March event being held in our hometown of Keene, NH. A friend of my wife's made her a hat, which I wore when we were walking back to the car. It was a good event, and it's helping our kids start to see beyond their privileged positions in life.

Status update on my Drupal contribution efforts

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Thought I'd give a quick update on my personal contribution efforts, given I'm involved in so many different projects.

Metatag for Drupal 7

The Drupal 7 version of Metatag is pretty darned solid at this point. Some tests were added recently that will make sure the output works correctly for all tests, so the next release might be the last for a while. Speaking of which, I'm planning to do a bug fix release on December 31st.

Metatag for Drupal 8

This is overdue for a stable release, and the good news is that we're almost there. Here's what my current goals are:

1.0-beta12: https://www.drupal.org/node/2829190

Will include all(-ish) of the meta tags that D7 has; I'm hoping to get some others working on these, at this point it's (almost) just a case of running some Drupal Console commands a whole bunch of times.

1.0-rc1: https://www.drupal.org/node/2563611

Will probably try to add the Views integration, given some lovely people were kind enough to put together a patch (https://www.drupal.org/node/2563647).

1.0: https://www.drupal.org/node/2563613

Needs some documentation, and any major bugs that show up in rc1 will be fixed.

Panelizer for Drupal 7

This is pretty stable, but needs a few more bugs fixed and a new release (https://www.drupal.org/node/2787147).

Panelizer for Drupal 8

Some great people have been taking care of this while I've been busy elsewhere. I took a peek this past week and helped a little plan out the goals for the 8.x-3.0 release, with a beta1 (https://www.drupal.org/node/2834847) due really soon and a stable shortly thereafter.

Fieldable Panels Panes for Drupal 7

FPP is pretty stable at this point, but has some awkward bits when it's used on a multilingual site; it needs a bit of work.

Everything else

There's also GoogleNews, Menu MiniPanels, Maillog, Phonetic, Code Per Node/CPN, Twitter, etc, etc. Those may get some TLC at some point, but unless a project shows up that needs improvements on them they're going to be waiting a while I'm afraid. Of course this is a perfect opportunity for enterprising souls out there to help out - if you're interested please let me know!

Plumbing sucketh, verily. (updated x2)

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Just to mention it, plumbing sucks. Last night I discovered that there was a slow leak on the sprayer for our kitchen's sink - no idea how long it had been there but there was visible damage in the cabinet under the sink. The leak was happening because an o-ring was wearing out on the sprayer attached to the faucet/tap, so after dinner I went to Home Depot to get a new o-ring. While there I picked up a small box of multiple sizes, figuring it might save me a trip some other time. Once I got home home I checked the different sizes, only to discover that the one size the box did not have was size I needed. So this morning I get up early to go to a small mom-n-pop hardware store down the road and they're out of the o-ring size I need ("I went through them a while ago and put in an order for more.." gah). I go down the road further to another hardware store and they didn't have o-rings with the same nomenclature, so I used my phone to find the dimensions I needed and grabbed one that fit the description. Took it home and it didn't fit, it was too small. So now I have to go back to Home Depot at lunchtime and hope they too haven't ran out of the size I need. Damnit.

Oh, and why don't have I the original washer to compare against? Because it went flying across the kitchen when I was taking it off and I wasn't able to find it.

Update: So, went to Home Depot, they had a small box of o-rings the size I needed, I bought it, went home, got to the kitchen and asked our son (who had bagged the small box) where the box was, and it was nowhere to be found. We checked the car, checked the path from the car to the house, checked the house - it's gone. Dagnamit. So I'll have to go back again.

Update #2: So.. After dinner I took Kian to the store to ask if anyone had found a small box of o-rings around the cash registers, they hadn't but they were very nice and gave be a replacement box. Got home with them and... they didn't fit, they were too thick to fit. So I called the store to ask if there was another size of o-ring that was a similar diameter but thinner, and after five minutes on hold decided to just drive back. After rooting around I found what seemed like it might work, bought it, put it in the bag and made sure I still had it in my bag when I got to the car, got home and - tadaa, it fits!

So after three days we finally have a fully working sink again! Yay!

Now to hire someone to fix the cabinet.

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