They Think It’s All Over

So Sandy has left us and is now bothering New York instead.  We’ve survived really lightly, with our city only suffering a few downed trees and flooded streets, nothing major.  And for us personally, no problems at all.

The husband went off to work on Sunday night while the storm was working up to its peak, so some friends who live in the same apartment block kindly invited me down for the evening to stop me feeling lonely or scared in the dark and stormy night.  Nice idea in theory.  What did we spend the evening doing though?  Watching a TV drama about Zombies.  Yeah, that will help with the fear when I’m back in my own apartment in the dead of night and we have a power cut!

Hubby made it home without problems in the early hours of Monday.  This was meant to be the worst day of the storm so we had no plans to go anywhere and kept our pyjamas on for the whole day.  Heavenly.  Contrary to expectations we had no more power cuts so it was a really uneventful but lovely day spent catching up on TV and just having a nice time together.  We normally want to use all our days off going out and exploring this new place that we live in, so it made a change to just hang out and do nothing.

We did venture out in the evening (finally having to get dressed at 8pm) for a games night with some friends.  I’m pleased to report that I kept my games champion tiara with a convincing victory 😀  Also by the time we finally crawled home in the early hours the wind and rain had definitely dropped off a bit.  This morning we woke up to a tiny bit of sunshine and dry streets.  The temperature has dropped significantly but this just means that it’s a bit more like your average October day in the UK rather than the sunbathing temperatures that we had a week ago.  It’s a bit strange actually having to wear a coat now.

So, overall no real harm done here by Sandy.  It’s felt just like a UK Bank Holiday weekend as pretty much everybody was off work/school and we had the chance to get together with friends.  Oh, and the weather was horrendous.

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Calm Before the Storm

It’s still fairly quiet here.  Well, for this area it’s actually really really windy and wet, it hasn’t stopped raining for about seventeen hours, but it’s no worse than your average October day in the UK.  In fact I’m starting to feel quite at home.  Anyway, the power went out at around 11am, back on for about 30 seconds, then off again.  Followed by sirens wailing everywhere.  I really shouldn’t have watched that Derren Brown programme about the end of the world last night.  We thought we were going to have to eat cold shepherd’s pie leftovers for lunch, but after about 45 minutes the power came back on again and has been on for the three hours since then.  We are fully expecting it to go off again sometime in the next twenty four hours and to come back on … erm … hopefully some time this side of Thanksgiving.

Hubby has just gone off to work so my only worry now is whether or not he can make it back home again tonight.  His workplace is fully hurricane-prepared so he’d actually be better off there, but I don’t really want to be stuck here by myself in a severe weather event.

Latest predictions are that the hurricane will not hit us directly but that we will still have extensive and sustained problems from it, i.e. flooding and power cuts.  We expect the worst of it to be with us sometime on Monday.  Given the fact that the eye of the storm is still a long way off and we are already suffering problems, it looks like it’s going to be a particularly interesting next twenty four to thirty six hours.  The balcony doors are already rattling in a threatening way so I’ll try not to look too surprised when they blow in in a spectacular fashion in the early hours ….

Batten Down the Hatches

So Hurricane Sandy is on its way to us.  Aside from experiencing the same hurricane on two sides of the Atlantic in 2004 (in Cuba and in Cornwall), I’ve never actually had to worry about such things before.  I also vaguely remember the UK storms of 1987 and I really enjoyed sitting around the radio by candlelight with my parents for several evenings during the lengthy power cuts, actually having conversations for a change instead of all staring blankly at the telly, but I didn’t have any actual responsibilities that time around so it wasn’t really a worry.

Hurricane season should be over now but we’ve just got wind (yes, pun intended) of this last-minute bonus “severe weather event”.  I thought we would get by without having any excitement of the weather variety this year.  We started noticing Sandy crossing the Caribbean a couple of days ago, but this is something that we’ve become very accustomed to, despite having only lived in the USA for a couple of months, and as usual we paid it only cursory notice because every other hurricane or tropical storm has passed us by without any bother.  Not this time though.

It’s pretty exciting for the hubby and me, as well as for the other Brits that we know who have been out here for less than twelve months, simply because a hurricane is not something we normally have to deal with.  As far as we can tell, at the moment the eye of the storm is predicted to make landfall a fair bit further north than here so we shouldn’t get the brunt of it, however these predictions can and do change fairly swiftly.  Whatever happens, we’ll get heavy rain, flooding and high winds, peaking somewhere between Sunday and Tuesday, or thereabouts.  So we shouldn’t have too much of a weather issue.  Hurricane Irene went right through here in July 2011 and that was a fair bit worse, by all accounts.

The issue we are really expecting to have is either losing water supply or, most likely, major power cuts.  The electricity can get knocked out at the merest puff of wind here, and it can take days to get it back.  And you thought America was a highly developed country, huh?  Multiply this by the fact that a massive chunk of the East coast is all likely to lose power at the same time, and you start to have some serious problems.

The mass panic buying started late yesterday morning and seemed to peak around tea time.  By this morning the supermarkets were out of water and no doubt a few other basic staples too.  Given the fact that the power should only be off for maybe five days at the most (oh I sound so blasé, just wait until I’ve been without t’internet for 48 hours then I’ll be moaning!) we personally haven’t gone too mad.  We already had a hurricane lamp, radio and torch passed on by some of our British predecessors out here, so I did take the sensible route of buying batteries for all of those items, along with some water, bread and cheese.  We’ll live on cheese sandwiches for a week.  The hubby then sent me back out for the secondary essentials – beer, wine, crisps and chocolate.  Oh and the flat is full of candles anyway, cos we’re romantic like that.

The weather has definitely changed over the last twenty four hours, although it now resembles your average breezy day down on the front at Southsea.  Given the fact that we normally don’t get any wind here though, this has come as somewhat of a shock.  I was thinking about it, and we’ve probably had no more than about seven days of rain since we moved out here.  We might just be making up for that over the next seven days.  Well I was only saying the other day that it didn’t feel like proper October weather out here.

So here’s to the next few days of hiding by candlelight in our designated “safe room” (otherwise known as the walk-in wardrobe) with a stash of beer and snacks until this thing blows over.  Hubby is pleased though – it looks like trick or treating might be cancelled…..