Battening Down the Hatches

After fifteen plus years in the East, you'd think we'd be used to the weather hype that always seems to precede storms  that come anywhere within 100 miles of us.  Yet again and again, we get sucked into the drama and the hyperbolic television meteorologists who spout such catch-phrases as "storm-of-the-century" and "super storm" with careless abandon.  Occasionally there is a noteworthy storm worth writing home about (September 2003's Hurricane Isabel, June 2012's derecho, and the winter of 2010 being the main three), but most storms here end up being a tad on the anti-climatic side. 

Now we have Hurricane Sandy heading our way, threatening to pummel our area as well as most of the mid-Atlantic and Northeast US.  The meteorologists are talking it up BIG time and while we still hope this is another one of those over-hyped storms, we worry that this one might be the real deal.  After all it's not every day that a category 1 hurricane is heading straight for some of the most populated cities in America....DC, NYC, Philadelphia.      Our whole area is under both flash flood and high wind warnings  and they've already cancelled school for Monday and Tuesday.   We live in a neighborhood full of beautiful mature trees and we rarely have a storm of note without some trees and power lines down somewhere in our neighborhood, so we fully expect to be without power for a few days once this really gets going. 

Here is our checklist of what we did to get ready, figuring that doomsday or not, some things are reasonable and helpful to do anyway: 
 
Stock up on water--✓
Buy more batteries--✓
Find the flashlights--✓
Fill up the gas tanks--✓
Bring in the trashcans and lawn furniture--✓
Make room in the garage for one of the cars--✓
Park the other car in the driveway away from neighbor's tree--✓
Plan a no-electricity-required menu--✓
Charge cell phones and laptops--✓Blog--✓
Finish up the ice cream--✓
Pray and look forward to sunnier days ahead--✓

I took this picture on the road up to the Griffiths Observatory in LosAngeles, CA

"...there is no fog so dense, no night so dark, no gale so strong, no mariner so lost but what the lighthouse of the Lord can rescue. It beckons through the storms of life. It calls, “This way to safety. This way to home.” It sends forth signals of light easily seen and never failing. "  Thomas S. Monson

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And on the same note, here's my facebook status from today: 
My mother-in-law, Sandy, is one of the sweetest, gentlest, most thoughtful people I know, which makes the impending storm that shares a name with her all the more ironic. We are battening down the hatches and praying that the storm proves to be a little more Grandma Sandy-like than the "Frankenstorm" that the meteorologists are predicting.

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