ready or not

This past winter I scoffed at the weather reports when a winter storm warning was forecast. I'm from Northeast Ohio. Seriously. They don't know from winter storms out here, I thought. I have to admit, however, we did have a couple of doozies. Over a foot of wet, heavy snow fell one night, crippling much of the East Coast, and keeping us busy digging out the driveway all day long. By and large, however, the "storms" that dismissed schools early and sent people to the store for emergency supplies were nothing more than a few inches of dry snow. I scoff at that.

I am not scoffing today, however, as I watch Hurricane Irene head up the coast straight for me. I had not anticipated facing the most dire hurricane warnings for this area in the past five years by myself. Well, the dogs are here, of course. But Ben flew out yesterday to attend his father's birthday party, and Julie and Andrew have very kindly taken in friends who had to evacuate a truly dangerous area along the coast. So it's just me. And I haven't even the slightest idea how to prepare for something like this.

Before Ben left, he rounded up all the flashlights and candles in the house and made sure that I had a transistor radio with working batteries in it. I went to the grocery store yesterday and bought some big bottles of water. Got home and realized I should have gotten some toilet paper too. (Isn't that one of the things people always scoop up in situations like this?) To further prepare, I have done probably pointless things like do the laundry and run the dishwasher. I can, of course, just turn on my television or check the newspaper for lists of supplies I should be laying in. It is probably too late to buy a generator, however, and what the heck would I do with it when I got it home anyway? It would be nice to have some large, battery-operated lanterns, but I am sure those are all gone, as well.

Living where I do, west of Baltimore, I am not so much worried about the hurricane as the aftermath. I know it will rain here for a long time and the wind will blow, but unlike our house in Kent, we have no big trees at all near us so there is no danger of a tree falling on the house or on my unprotected car. The drain outside the basement door is clear, so water will probably not seep in there as it did during the last big storm we had. The backyard will fill up with water, I know, and I fear that our second cherry tree will not survive having its roots soaked again, but I realize these are minor things.

The thing I really fear - and fear is not too strong a word - is a prolonged power outage. I'm not good at power outages. I can hear my family laughing now as they read this. I am terrible at power outages. I just don't know what to do with myself when the power goes off. I can't get on the computer. I can't watch tv. If it is dark out, of course I can't see. My cell phone will only hold its charge for so long without electricity. The A.C. will not work, and the air will become hot and stuffy. The sump pump won't work, and then the basement really will take on water. (Ben's instructions on what to save first were not encouraging.) And, really, the most horrible thing about it is not knowing when power will be restored. I can't tell you how much I am dreading this.

And yet there is this underlying hope that I don't even want to acknowledge that maybe it won't be so bad. Maybe the weather forecasters are over reacting just like they did about impending snow storms. See, I just don't know. And that is what I hate the most.

I don't like Ike

I live in Northeast Ohio. I don't love living here. I really want to live on the east coast. Right on the east coast. Like I could see the ocean out my windows and stroll to the beach whenever I so desired. Since we can't afford to live on the beach, however, I have always comforted myself with the idea that at least we're safe when hurricane season comes around - until last night, that is.

Yesterday was a funny day, weatherwise. Soupy and hot in the morning gave way to sunny and windy (an odd combination) in the early afternoon. Although rain was predicted, we never really had any. Ben and I watched football games on and off throughout the day. I was mostly puzzling out a new knitting pattern, and Ben wandered in and out, as he does. We were really waiting for the Browns-Steelers game to start at 8:00 p.m. I was excited at the idea of watching the game on Sunday Night Football, but, as it turned out, we didn't see a minute of the game.

The wind had really picked up in the early evening, and we could hear small branches from the big, old oak trees surrounding our house hitting the roof and deck. The strong winds made the dogs nervous, and Lucie was either parked on someone's lap or hiding under the coffee table. I was watching the last seconds of the San Diego-Denver game, hoping the Chargers could pull off a last-minute miracle (y'all know how I feel about the Broncos) when the power went out. And flickered and went out. And flickered and went out. And stayed out. And that was pretty much it.

Since it was just past 7:30 it wasn't totally dark out yet, but we could see it soon would be. Ben rounded up candles from around the house and put them on the mantelpiece in front of the mirror, where their light was reflected. I lit candles in the kitchen and bathroom, in case we needed to make forays into those parts of the house. Most importantly, Ben found a transistor radio with batteries that still worked so that we could listen to the football game until the power came back on. That's what I was thinking, anyway. I think Ben knew otherwise.

I called the Ohio Edison hotline around 9:00, but the hours continued to pass with no electricity. We listened to the entire football game on the radio, which was o.k., except for the fact that we had to listen to the incredibly annoying commercials. Did you know that radio commercials are even more annoying than the ones on t.v.? I bet you didn't think that was possible.

We had a myriad of concerns. Of course we had been grocery-shopping earlier in the day, and were concerned about the refrigerator full of food that was gradually warming up. Neither one of us knew how widespread the outage was, and didn't know if we would be expected at work today. We had our cell phones, but for how long? If we couldn't recharge them, we couldn't use them. Fortunately, the temperature had dropped as the hurricane blew in, and we were able to open the windows to the cool, fresh air as the evening progressed with no sign of power being restored.

I had a flashlight and my cell phone on the night stand when I went to bed, and I tried to ignore the dozens of little worries swirling through my mind, in hopes that I could fall asleep. I slept fitfully for a couple of hours, and was actually awake when the power came back on around 2:00 a.m. Only a couple of lights were on in the house, and when the air conditioning and my ceiling fan kicked in, I was able to fall soundly asleep for the rest of the night. We had been without power for about six and a half hours.

Okay, I know I am lucky compared to the people living in Southeast Texas, but that is exactly my point. I don't live on the coast, and one of the few benefits of that is not having to worry about hurricanes and the woes associated with them. Until now.