battening down the hatches!

Please oh please Mother Nature, don't force our town to CANCEL Halloween..... AGAIN.... 2 YEARS IN A ROW. I mean is that really too much to ask???

This time last year we were preparing for a SNOW STORM. Yes a snow storm.... we still had leaves on the trees and the temps were on the warm side for snow so it was heavy and wet... and we got over a foot of it. It stuck to the trees, and then they all broke taking down power lines with them. Much of our REGION was without power for WEEKS. We were extremely lucky to be only without power for 3 hours... I am not sure why this happened. Schools closed and they canceled Halloween. Well technically the postponed it to the following week, in which many people still didn't have power and crews were still doing clean up. It was weird, and we had to trick or treat early because we had to be somewhere at 6.

(Whoops... totally walked away from this post last night unintentionally)

My husband has been in Washington DC since Friday with a group of teenagers from his school. Due to the storm they left a day early. Winds here have started and aren't strong.... yet...

The first bad hurricane I remember going through was Hurricane Bob back in '91. I was 11. At the time I was living at the Cape and it hit us at a category 3. We moved "inland" to our friends place in the western part of town and spent the storm there. Arriving back home was crazy. Here is a picture of where I grew up.

The south end of the Canal is on the right side of this picture. Clearly this is a beach community. Some people decided they didn't care if their boats roughed out the storm in the water. What they didn't expect was to find said boats IN PEOPLE'S FRONT YARDS trapped on dry land after the water receded. Low lying areas still were sort of flooded, and on our house a piece of the vinyl siding was hanging off under the window. We were very lucky in that we lived on a small hill and the water only came to the bottom of our street. Other houses were not so lucky- They were swept away, or completely flooded as whole sections of our little village are low lying and/or very close to old cranberry bogs. In order for these houses to rebuild they had to be built on stilts.

So when Hurricane Irene hit last year...

(and... I walked away again, but this time I blame my sister who called me on the phone. Now it's the next day, again.)

Where was I? oh yes! Hurricane Irene...
So when it was approaching I got all panicky because of the way I remembered Bob being to violent.What happened instead was that it was a bit breezy, and not rainy at all. So even though I was still anxious about the weather I drove south for 15 minutes to attend a baby shower for a friend. I was a good time and everything was going great... that is until I was headed home... pretty much all roads north were closed because the rivers were flooding and other roads because trees were down. It took me 4 different tries before I found a road to which I could get to Greenfield.. it took me over an hour to get home. What ended up happening was that a crap ton of water flooded our region. Roads and bridges got washed out and people were stranded... MANY without power for a long time. My friend lost her house. Remember how I was at a baby shower. It was that friend who lost a house. Over a year later they haven't been able to rebuild because the flood insurance people said they won't cover their house loss FROM A FLOOD! Those f*ckers. some areas in Vermont are still recovering... It's crazy

And here we are in the midst of another hurricane. They are a way of life in in New England along with Snow storms and 4 distinct seasons. Given the choice of tornadoes or hurricanes, I would most certainly choose hurricanes. These guys we can prepare for, relocate from and most importantly we know they are coming- all of this not really possible for a tornado.

I am not nearly as anxious about this storm as I was about Irene, I am not sure why. But I'm glad for it. I hope everyone stays dry and safe during the storm and that Halloween goes on as planned!