Irene Is On Her Way

The hurricane is en route and with a vengeance. Now I’m just waiting for the power to go out.

Yesterday, the town I live in issued a voluntary evacuation and a directive to get your car off the street (in another town or in a multi-level garage). Today, the town issued mandatory evacuations if you live on a garden or first floor apartment.

The boyfriend and I don’t have a car and we live on the top floor of a 13 floor building. We decided to stay.

We face the Hudson River. Thoughts of a tidal wave have passed through my mind.

It remains to be seen if we made the right choice. All of our furniture is off the balcony. With multiple trips to buy tape (hot seller!) we have taped our windows.

We’ve got a wall of windows in the bedroom and a sliding glass door in the living room. I made the boyfriend put this plastic tarp over the windows in the bedroom.

I filled a plastic crate with photo albums and other irreplaceable items. All of my possessions are in this apartment, so after human life, I have chosen items precious and after human life, irreplaceable, to me. This crate is in another hall closet. I moved out the less important vacuum and suitcases to make room.

I also took my important paperwork and stored it on high shelves in the closet. I made the boyfriend take down a gorgeous framed picture off the wall. That, too, is in the closet.

Clearly I have no idea what Mother Nature wants to do but if I have ample time to prepare I am going to ‘hide’ some stuff.

Because our apartment is high and we get wind on a normal day, I am assuming the absolute worst. I am going into this thinking that our windows will blow out and we will be spending a good portion of time hanging out in the bathroom (the only place in our one bedroom apartment with no windows) until we can move to safety.

Oh and yes, I already have an evacuation bag packed. It just has my toiletries and medicine and pajamas. I would just have to grab my glasses or contacts (whichever I am not currently wearing).

Call me crazy. I like to call myself prepared. With the rearranging of furniture thanks to the addition of balcony furniture now in the living room, my floors got cleaned. So did the bathroom since I expect that we will be spending time camping out in there in the next few hours.

I will leave you with these thoughts from my observations earlier today.

1 – If there are calls for evacuations, why do the news people show up? For our entertainment? If said power goes out, no one is watching and they are right in harm’s way!

2 – Why does the news ‘reward’ idiots with getting them on camera? Example (this is not verbatim but pretty close).

Newscaster: ‘Hey you know there’s an evacuation of all of the beaches in New Jersey?’
Idiot: ‘Yes.’
Newscaster: ‘Ten why are you here? WITH your small children?’
Idiot: ‘To watch.
Newscaster: ‘When are you going to leave?’
Idiot: ‘When I get hit with a wave’
??? They really aired this on television today. I wanted to smack this idiot.

3 – If there are mandatory evacuations and people choose to stay, they should also choose to rescue themselves. This especially annoys me with the people at the beach. Why should a first responder be put in harm’s way, the unpredictable and unforgiving ocean, because someone failed to acknowledge a MANDATORY evacuation?

That’s it for now. Am sure to have more hurricane observations once Irene makes her way to my area. I will post again when I get the electricity, that I am banking on losing, back.

In the meantime, wherever in the world you may be, stay safe.