- or -

Let's Panic About Hurricanes 

While we are here preparing for the Stormpocalypse, (yes, an earthquake, a hurricane and the possibility of tornadoes in the same week; this is the meteorological equivalent of an alligator riding on a shark in the Rocky Mountains) the Shortlings are planning to put on their swimsuits and play in God's sprinkler.

Other than our everyday emergency preparedness food storage and seventy-two hour kits, which we always have on hand, I have made the following preparations:
  • full tank of gas in the car
  • make sure we have a couple of bags of sand handy in case the neighbors' sump pump fails and we have to seal up the basement door (his house sits a little lower than ours and it tends to pump all the ground water out of our higher elevation site too, so the only times we've ever had water issues in the basement since we've lived here is when his sump pump has stopped working)
  • instruct my husband to purchase no perishable food from the grocery store
  • buy three bags of ice to keep in the fridge for when we might, make that will, lose power

Yesterday we received a robocall from our power company, warning us that power outages are likely and that we probably shouldn't expect electricity to be restored in a timely manner.  Nothing like creating lowered expectations right off the bat.  The tweets about this call were hilarious and I retweeted a couple of them, which caught the attention of the power company.  They tweeted a url back at me in self defense, which claimed that they weren't trying to be alarmist and they were basically better than the news media.  Perhaps, but the news media was not recently rated the lowest performing company in America, so maybe they should just stick to fixing that infrastructure they keep claiming they're improving.

The other preparation we made was to use up all the sparklers the night before the storm.  Because who knows how long we'll be underwater?
    

 

*Yes, I'm totally aware that the song is "Come on Eileen" and not "Irene," but I can't stand to be one more person referencing the song Good Night Irene, because that doesn't really make a lot of sense now, does it?