15 August 2004. In bed after the hurricane, I went through arguments against the proposition that Shakespeare did not write the plays attributed to him to take my mind off the hurricane. (As I'm pretty sure I've mentioned, one of my hobbies is arguing for Shakespeare on the Internet.) It worked. I slept pretty well. The next day, I got my first good look at my roof, and saw that it was down to bare wood in spots. My yard was full of shingles from mine and other roofs. The majority of the houses in the neighborhood suffered about the same as mine, but a few did much worse, and some had little or no damage. I spent an hour or so making a pile of debris in my front swale. I visited a friend a couple of miles away. To get to her house, I passed a flattened hardware store. I'd been hoping to get a saw there. My own was gone: I'd stupidly left it out on the dryer in my lanai, and Charley blew it away. It was the only thing of note I lost, I believe. The thing I most noticed was the brightness of the absence of the many trees that went down.