Letter from America - November 04

Hi Ian

We were up in Disney for a long weekend. As you can imagine, I spent most of August and September dodging hurricanes. I work for the power company, so we ended up working almost 6 weeks solid of 16 hours days restoring power. Hence the Disney trip - they gave every worker who helped restore power a free 5-day pass to the parks, and also gave a 50% discount on any other tickets bought at the same time - too good an offer to turn down.
We didn't do too badly with the storms - the house lost about 50 roof shingles in both storms that came from the east. We didn't get any water damage, but we need to replace the roof soon - all of the overtime money will go in one big cheque !!
The holiday season kicks off over here this week.

Thursday is Thanksgiving, which is the biggest celebrated holiday as it is a non-religious day, so everyone celebrates. It's pretty much a dry run for Christmas dinner - turkey, potatoes etc. Daniel, our eldest, is flying down from university in Atlanta for a good meal.
I read about the Alan Mullery night on your web site. You guys certainly get some big names to come to the annual event. I was also saddened to hear about Emlyn Hughes early death - he was one of the old true characters of the game.
You've no doubt seen in the news that violence has started to infiltrate professional sports over here with the goings on at the Indiana Detroit basketball game last Friday. I'll say one thing about the way they run things - by Sunday they had announced the suspensions for the players involved - one player is suspended for the rest of the season (73 games), another 30, and one more 25. All of the suspensions are without pay, so in all ten million dollars in salaries were lost.
Best get to work. The trouble with long weekends is you still need to cram five days work into three !!
Keep in touch, and please pass on my best wishes of the season to all who remember me.
Terry

Terry played for Wyvern Members (later Crawley Sports) and can be seen in his hey day by clicking here (back row, last player on the right - with the beard).

PS: Here are a couple of pictures of damage that I saw while out working the storms in the Palm Beach area:
This shows why you need hurricane shutters up to protect your windows. This was from an area that had minimal hurricane force winds.