Hurricane Sandy

We made it through Hurricane Sandy unscathed and I’m very grateful we did, considering all the awful devastation in New York City and the Jersey shore. Our office was closed Monday and Tuesday so I just worked from home and got a normal amount of work done. We never lost power, surprisingly, and there was no flooding in the basement.

I did discover that our peeling ceiling is in fact a leak in the roof, rather than just wallpaper peeling due to humidity from the shower. I heard a drip in the ceiling Monday morning. Luckily, I was able to get into the crawl space and shove a bucket under the drip, so we’re OK until we can get a roofer out. Knock on wood, that seems to be the only leak.

One thing this hurricane taught me is that we can be resourceful. I didn’t make any kind of special purchases for this storm. Thursday night, I had done my regular food shopping and didn’t buy anything special. We have enough food in the house that we could survive for a few days and if we got desperate, there was always the Halloween candy we got for the trick or treaters. I never buy any booze or comfort food anyway before a storm.

I didn’t buy any bottled water either but just filled pitchers with tap water. During Hurricane Irene, I discovered that bottled water was gone from stores and all of Delaware was in a death panic and figured, “I’m not running around looking for water. We have filtered water from the fridge so I’ll use that.” When the crisis passes, I’ll just use the water for coffee or something so it’s not wasted. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that before last year. I didn’t buy extra ice, either. I just got ice from the icemaker and put it in containers. If the power failed, I would just fill coolers with the ice and put the perishables in there.

Plus, we technically could still cook since I could light the gas burners or use the BBQ grill. We’re lucky to live in a built-up area and can walk to places to get food if we need to.

We have a bunch of batteries in bulk that we got from BJ’s so we didn’t need to buy those. We also have an insane amount of candles already and I found a bunch of old candles in the basement. So we were lucky enough that we made do with what we had in the house. I was even able to get a bucket to fix the drip without going out for any supplies. All this underlines two things: How much crap we have in our house that we don’t even know about and how we can survive on what we have on hand without freaking out and running around shopping.

Thank God this storm fell well after my supermarket day so I didn’t have to deal with hordes of people shopping for a nuclear winter rather than a two-day hurricane. Hurricanes Sandy and Irene have shown me how similar the hurricane preparation is to snow preparation and that’s unfortunate. Hurricanes actually are serious business and we do need to be prepared with food and supplies, so a little freaking out is justifiable. But from what I heard, people weren’t food shopping with much more intensity last week than they do when the forecast is 4 to 6 inches of snow. There’s something out of whack there because 4 to 6 inches of snow are truly nothing to worry about unless you’re elderly. So next winter, when everyone flips the fuck out before a mundane snowstorm, I’ll be asking why they’re acting like a destructive hurricane is coming.