Having lived in the Hampton Roads area and my (Beth's) parents living in NC for the last number of years we are no strangers to hurricane warnings, gusty winds and flooding. When we moved to New Jersey we thought we traded in our hurricanes for blizzards. Apparently we were wrong!
The forecasts started looking pretty menacing at the end of last week with landfall predicted for somewhere in our fair state of New Jersey, storm surges of historic proportions, wind gusts and rainfall on top of it all. Last year we had the experienced one of the joys of home-ownership....a flooded basement following the rainfall from Hurricane Irene. So this year we were more prepared. We had gotten a big wet-vac for Christmas (thanks Karen and Mike!) so we pulled that out of the garage and set it up, ran the hose from the basement window to the street for easy drainage, pulled everything off the lowest shelves, etc. We located our box of candles (apparently we could open our own small Yankee Candle-esque shop!), checked batteries in flashlights, bought some canned food and wine and hunkered down, ready for the storm.
Sunday night into Monday weren't bad at all. We spent Monday cleaning the house, organizing things that had been neglected, vacuuming and all that fun stuff; basically taking advantage of Eddie being off of work. (This was the kind of work we usually have to do at night after Henry goes to bed, which neither of us ever feel like doing!) As the day progressed the winds started to pick up and the rain started falling (but not much). We kept the TV on all day and were amazed to see the flooding along the shore and coast even well before high tide. It was clear that it wasn't going to be a good night for many people.
By nightfall the wind was getting pretty strong and we were thankful that it did not rain much. Karen and Mike joined us for the evening (since the in-laws had lost power) and they reported lots of downed trees already. We put Henry to bed, broke out the moscato and hunkered down to watch the TV reports. (Sidenote: There was some hilarity when I discovered the twitter profile of "El Bloombito", which is a fake twitter account of NYC Mayor Bloomberg who always speaks Spanish at the end of his press conferences. The fake account is a spanglish version of a mixture of real things he might say along with some humor. It has made me laugh many times over the last few days.) We went to bed around 11pm and as I climbed into bed the power went out.
The wind howled and I had a hard time falling asleep with visions of flying debris and eventual flooding of our basement in my head. Thankfully when we got up in the morning we found only a few small branches and twigs down in our yard and a dry basement. We were still without power but we felt pretty lucky considering what we had prepared ourselves for.
We packed up some things and came over to Eddie's grandparents' house since they kept power. We've enjoyed just hanging around with family, playing with Henry and found out this late this afternoon that our power has returned to our house.
Seeing the reports from around the states really make us feel very lucky that we are all well, our house is safe and we had a warm place to stay.
Thank you to all of you that called, Facebooked, etc. your concern for us!
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