Waiting (and waiting and waiting) for the hurricane to pass.
Think: helpless, anxious, helpless, sleepless, helpless, unable to take any kind of action which, if we could have done it, would have included loading our whole house on a flat-bed trailer and hot-footing it out to south-central Virginia. Short of doing that, one is left with the Helpless-Waiting Syndrome.
In past years we have done our waiting by staying here at home. This year the fact that the track showed Sandbridge taking a direct hit from Irene made us consider leaving. The clincher was the Mandatory Evacuation notice and the announcement that the City was going to shut down the sewer system at 12 noon on Friday -> no water flow, no sewer function until 12 noon on Sunday. (VB has a vacuum sewer system and they didn't want all that sand and sea water sucked in to the system.)
We have been at Sandbridge, in this house, since 1976, so one of the hardest things about the hurricane was packing up and leaving it all sitting here, three streets west of the ocean. That, for the animal lovers among us, was complicated by the No-Win situation with our tabby cat, named Doug. When we tried (very gently) to get him into his cat carrier he bolted, ran upstairs and displayed dilated pupils about the size of small dinner plates. We call that his Shredder Look ... come too close and get all your uncovered skin, face, arms, hands shredded in a flash.
With the radar storm track running right smack over Sandbridge our options were:
1. Both of us stay home with Doug (too hard to decide; reject that idea);
2. Fran stays with Doug ... (I'm not even going to finish that statement (too easy to decide; reject that idea);
3. Acquiesce to Doug's wishes to let him stay home, discuss our first failure to get him in to the carrier and admit that, if we tried again, our medical bills for the ER and a couple of hundred cat-claw-induced sutures would be very high; (too easy to decide neither one of us wanted to think about the cost-per-stitch);
4. Try to convince ourselves that "he would be OK" if we leave him. We didn't convince ourselves, but it was a Mandatory Evac order.
After stewing around for the better part of a day, we decided to give him the run of the house and we left him to do as he pleased. As it turns out, he was fine when we got back, had not even eaten all the dry food we left in the dishes, and he undoubtedly got far more good, sound sleep than we did. He slept. We worried.
About the sleeplessness: Personally, I really didn't sleep for 2.5 days while we were away from the house, not knowing if it would be there when we got back. I have never been one to tolerate sleep-deprivation and the last couple of days the suspense of not knowing the outcome just cleaned my clock. With 8-10 hours of sleep a night in our own bed I'll probably be back to normal (whatever that is) by this Friday, but our nerves are about as frayed as they have ever been. Lying awake in friend's guest bed you can learn lots of things: e.g., I now know that there are 11,087 (plus/minus 3% sampling error) holes of various sizes in each ceiling sound tile. (We over-nighted at the home of a former colleague, whose house is 25 miles west of the ocean front).
After 2.5 days locked out, they opened the road to residents-only with ID. In the Believe-It-Or-Not category: at home we had no external or internal wind or water damage; there was a very brief water-spout which became a tornado and hit five blocks south of us ... (we are in the 2800s and the spout hit 3300 block), it wiped the roofs off five houses and then picked up and dissolved into the windy / cloudy / rainy sky.
In our yard two branches fell off a couple of pear trees in our back yard = no problem at all compared to the total destruction of those houses ... of course, the spout had to hit the huge 3-story houses (some of them very new, very expensive, built for rentals) right on the beach.
Speaking of branches falling off trees: in the backyard a 10-to-12 foot limb came down (from about 40 feet up) and landed parallel to the rear wall of his house and made a thump that made us all jump. Across his back fence, in the neighbor's yard an old, 60-to-70-foot tree came out of the ground, root-ball-and-all and made a whopper of a noise when it hit the neighbor’s yard. We estimated the root ball was 10-12 feet across. Fortunately, nothing hit either house.
Our garages (at home) are at ground level and face west away from the ocean. With really heavy rain storms we might get some water leaking under the doors, but with the hurricane blowing in from the east we didn't get a drop in either garage.
I think the 30-foot-high bank of trees along the canal in our back yard (that would be on the ocean-side, blocking the wind as it came on shore) were part of our salvation. They are almost like a green wall and undoubtedly slowed the wind as it battered the neighborhood. Never thought that a bunch of pear and pine trees would be that valuable. Another positive result of the 85 - 115 MPH winds: a lot of the high-calorie tallow berries were blown off the Chinese Tallow Berry trees ... the birds are flocking around the yard having a pre-Winter feast.
Side-light news item (film at 11): pear tree leaves are not very strong. When they blow off the trees they kind of "shatter" like glass. So the east-facing wall of the house looked like it had green paint splatter all over it. Actually made us laugh when we saw it (nothing says post-hurricane residual high-anxiety like two goof-balls laughing a leaf particles stuck to a wall).
Since we have Internet phone, cable TV and internet email etc and they have all been out until about an hour ago, so we missed some calls and are answering them today. As fate would have it, I canceled the VERIZON Wireless card for my laptop about three weeks ago so we didn't have that cellular connection either.
Anyway, we are home, the A/C works (thank Heaven, because the temp is still 80 and the humidity is even higher than that), we have hot water and cold drinks and none of the food thawed.
Folks around here have been referring to these days as the two weeks from Hell ... first shoe to drop was the earthquake (epicenter between Charlottesville and Richmond), the second shoe to drop was the hurricane, with the packing to get away from it and re-packing to return to the beach ... now we are hoping that Mother Nature is not a three-legged giant with another shoe to drop on us. I am betting we are out of the woods for a while ... but hurricane season is not over yet ... so we are not taking the plywood off the windows in the glassed-in sun room on the east-facing ocean-side of the house yet ... maybe after Thanksgiving (*), but we'll need turkey and oyster dressing and cranberry sauce and figgy pudding to fortify us first ... then when we wake up from our nap we can decide about the plywood.
(*) [I wonder to whom the Detroit Lions will lose this year?] (*) (*)
(*) (*) [ Wasn't that good? I didn't say "I wonder who the Detroit Lions will lose to ..." and leave my participle dangling. I mean, given the damage a hurricane could have done, I'm just glad to HAVE a participle, so I certainly am not going to leave it dangling.]
