2012_10_31 Wednesday

Happy Halloween and Post-Sandy!


Well, we weathered SuperStorm Sandy alright. We lost power at 2:30, which was hours before the storm actually hit us at 8pm. The wind advisory ended around 11pm; the gusts were pretty scary. Our town has lots of very old trees, and many of them came down, knocking out power for most of the town. We expect no power for 7-10 days after the storm. We had a generator on stand-by (lesson learned from Hurricane Irene), but because there wasn't as much rain as we anticipated, our basement stayed dry without it. A day without power is an adventure, but more than that just isn't fun. So, we packed up all our food and headed inland to my folks in central PA and left the generator (and our cats) for our neighbors. Jonathan is out of school through the week, possibly into next week. 

We did hear a large crash mid-storm, come to realize that our neighbors across the street lost their van and garage to two trees crashing down on them. Our street is a dead-end, and the tree that took out our power also tore down wires across our road, blocking us in. We did a little off-roading to get out of dodge. In all, there were eight major trees down on our road alone! We didn't see any houses damaged, though, so that's fortuitous. Clean-up is going to take a very long time. Our local gas station is out of gas. At least one store in town sustained damage. 

I did remember to pack up the kids' Halloween costumes, so check out the pix of the storm (there are front/back yard pre-Sandy; front/back yard at power-out; and front/back yard post-Sandy, and they all look the same! and various downed trees at neighbors'); then Skeleton Jonathan and Princess Elise; and some post-pumpkin carving with Opa. Jonathan wrote a note that said (something like): "If I walk into town with you, we have to get frozen yogurt," so we did (for milk and to mail a bill, really) just before the storm.