So last week was a crazy one here on the east coast. I had very different plans for my first ever blog post, but since Mother Nature threw us a curve ball, here I am. I have always had interesting timing, why should blogging be any different? But stay tuned, I'll do the intro post later this week, when things calm down again. Ha! That's wishful thinking, given the daily chaos that is my household - I'm not sure it's ever really calm. It's certainly never dull!
I felt my first earthquake last Tuesday. This is not a first I was all that anxious to ever experience, but it was a mini-adventure. For the record, mini-adventure is the best case scenario for any earthquake. I am not a fan of any type of extreme weather. I was called for jury duty, so I was spending the day at my county's courthouse. Insert joke about potentially apocalyptic weather and the U.S. legal system here. I was waiting to cross the street leading to the courthouse when I felt the ground shake. The first thought that ran through my head was that it was like a subway train had just passed under my feet. Except the city I was in doesn't have a subway! I walked away with a touch of vertigo. Yuck. I hate that feeling. My husband was a few miles away and didn't feel a thing. It hit at nap time, my daughter slept right through it. Thank goodness.
It was an interesting to me that clearly no two people had the same experience. Asking two people who were in the same building if they felt it, one said, "Felt what?" and the other replied that she absolutely felt it, it set her rocking chair in motion and rattled the picture frames on her walls. This scenario repeated several times over a couple days almost verbatim, which gave me a weird deja vu.
The earthquake was big news for about two days, then Hurricane Irene eclipsed it completely. That's a sentence I never expected to utter. And I am starting to wonder what Mother Nature is trying to tell us. She is clearly not a happy camper! It took us a full two days to get ready for the storm. Including deciding whether or not to take the satellite dish down from the roof (not), to buy or not to buy LED lanterns (not), whether or not to brave the supermarket for odds and ends for dinners (yes), and what to do with all of the plants in pots around our property (garage). I'm glad we didn't spend any money on lanterns that would have gone, unused, to live in our shed after the storm. Never to be seen again. My husband hit the supermarket Friday morning before the run on milk and bread started.
Strange as this may sound, I did enjoy being outside working while the storm approached. Also, we are perennially bad at the end of season yard clean up (yup, we're that house on the block), so now we are a step ahead for fall. If I can resist the temptation to get it all back out again...shh, don't tell my husband!
We were very fortunate and didn't sustain any serious damage of any kind. We had family members under mandatory evacuation, some of them came to stay at our house. It was very stressful not knowing when or if they would be able to go home, but thankfully their homes were all still standing after Irene screamed on by. They left as soon as the roads home reopened on Sunday. It was then that I realized I was wrong about the calm...it was so peaceful to have our home to ourselves again!
