When Hurricane Irma came roaring into Jacksonville, FTVLive knew there was a good chance we were going to lose power and our Internet. 

What we didn't want was to not have FTVLive updated for you guys each and every day. So along with preparing our house for the storm, we prepared the website for Irma as well. 

First, we made sure the FTVLive Intern was at a location that would have power and could update. 

Back at the FTVLive World HQ, I charged all my portable devices and made sure they were ready. That included two MacBook Airs, three iPads, one Amazon Fire and my phone. Before the storm hit, AT&T sent a message out saying there would be no data overage charges for Florida residents until September 18th. 

So, when  I lost power the first night and it was too dangerous to go outside, I set up a personal hotspot on my phone and used my MacBook Air to update the site. 

The problem is, using your iPhone as a hotspot sucks the battery down very fast. But, I used a Mophie external battery to keep the phone going longer. The Mophie can give you a few more hours of phone life, which was huge. 

It all worked, but it took a long time over the phone's hotspot to do anything. Still. we were able to post 20 stories and update FTVLive on time, while a Hurricane was right outside the front door. 

The next day, the weather was better, but we still had no power. I knew using the phone as my WiFi connection was not a good choice. 

So, using power outage maps, I was able to find out what areas still had power (there were not many). Then, I looked to see if there was a Starbucks in that area. 

I got up at 1:30AM and drove to the Starbucks that I knew had power. Then I was able to connect to their WiFi, from my car sitting in the parking lot. Starbucks wasn't open, but the WiFi was still on and working. Most Starbucks use Google WiFi, which is very fast and very reliable. 

Once again, I was able to bang out 20 stories and post them on time for you guys. 

Then I would head home and charge my laptop with the small generator I had. It was not the best working environment but in those situations, you do what you have to do. My years in the field of TV news, we had to use many tricks to get the story on the air and doing so on a website is just an extension of that. 

I was ready to head to Starbucks again for night 3, but thankfully the power came back on and so did the Internet about an hour after that.

Since then, it's been work on FTVLive, work on making repairs to my house from the Hurricane and cleaning up down trees and branches.

Phone service for everyone in Florida is spotty right now. You are getting a number of dropped calls and bad connections.  Making calls has been a problem and sometimes I just give up on that and try later. 

It has been a long week and I'll be honest, I'm exhausted. But, there are so many in this state that has it much, much worse than me. They will be without power for weeks and maybe even months.

I hope that those people will be back online soon and can start putting their lives back together. 

One thing that never did cross my mind was that I would just not update the site for a few days while riding this thing out.

I know that you guys rely on FTVLive and I did not want to let you down. 

Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to go try and take a nap.