Hello Again!

I think my New Year's Resolution should be to update this blog more often.  :/

Anyway, hello there!

We survived Hurricane Sandy.  So did our house.  Our side fence is a bit dented from a tree limb, but when your town tells you to get out because they don't expect the sand berm to hold and that now would be an excellent time to exercise your freedom of religion, and the only damage you end up with is a dented fence, it's really not even worth mentioning.  Especially when the towns on either side of you are gone.

So what did we learn from this experience?

1.  WeeBee has complete trust that I will keep him safe.  The day before we evacuated, I was trying to bring as many things upstairs as I could, and pack our bags.  WeeBee kept bringing all his toys, blankets, and paraphernalia back downstairs.  I finally sat him down and told him that a terrible storm was coming and the water might come and take away all our things, so he had to stop bringing full sized blankets and 17 toy cars downstairs.  Harsh?  Perhaps, but, "WeeBee, stop bringing your things downstairs" wasn't phasing him.  He listened to my description of the apocalpyse, blinked, and then said, "But Mommy, you will protect me!  You will keep me safe!"  Totally not the point I was trying to make, but probably exactly what I needed to hear at that moment.  Also, it's nice to know that at least one person thinks you have your act together.

2.  That flood gate that I always thought was kind of ugly and ruined the view when I went on a walk?  Yeah, that's basically the reason I still have a house.  Thank you, Army Corp of Engineers and whatever people agreed to that 25 years ago.

3.  I have to say, the whole mess has given me a new appreciation for this little house.  It's not perfect.  This whole yearly evacuation thing is getting old.  If I wanted to leave every fall, I would have bought a house with an ocean view in North Carolina.  I'd love another closet and I'm not really a fan of stacked washer/dryers.  A basement would be nice.  But it's survived an earthquake and two hurricanes without any damage, and there are plenty of "nicer" homes in the towns around here that can't say that.  It's a bit surreal to drive down the road and see a deck on the highway, or a two story house knocked off its foundation and left in the middle of a side street.  I mean, you expect to see trees down, and some crushed cars and garages.  The whole house-in-street thing I always associated with tornadoes.  And when you've spent the night obsessively checking Facebook for updates and see that places that you wandered with your kids are gone, seeing your house is still there makes it look like the most gorgeous thing in the world.

4.  Supermarkets after a week with spotty power and limited deliveries look like something out of Soviet Russia.  We take our supermarkets seriously in this part of Jersey.  Used to six different types of quinoa to choose from and eight kinds of tomatoes?  Ha.  Try a crate of butternut squash, a couple of cartons of orange juice, and some unidentified green vegetable that you vaguely remember seeing on the Food Network.  And this was a week after the storm.  I was seriously half expecting people to be selling things on the black market in the parking lot.

5.  While there will always be people running around looting and scamming after something like this, there are also lovely people who will come from all over to help out.  And even if you don't directly need that help as much as others, it's nice to know that when the Mayan apocalypse comes, maybe it won't turn into an episode of Extreme Preppers, with everyone shooting each other on sight, just because you think they're after the stash of canned yams hidden under the back steps that you announced on national tv.  So, if any of you lovely people ever stumble upon this blog by accident, thank you.

I will try to update more often.  I actually caught up with laundry the other day.  For all of 15 minutes, because then WeeBee started dunking toilet paper in the toilet and splashing water all around the bathroom, which required towels, but for 15 glorious minutes I could say, "HAH!  THERE IS NO LAUNDRY TO BE DONE!"  So there is always hope that I could actually post more than once every three months.  :)