24 hours later....,,

I was clearly wrong about the state of this storm. After an inventory of our neighborhood and a drive around the area, it's a flipping miracle we came out of it unscathed.


I thought it was just one neighbor who got hit with a tree but it was actually three, just on this little road alone. And a lot of the people who didn't have their houses hit had their yards torn up by falling trees. It's absolutely brutal out there.


I thought the neighbor across the street was okay because his house didn't look crushed but one of the branches actually crashed through his garage/roof and, just to add insult to injury, broke the windshield of the convertible he had in there for 'safe keeping'. :(



Trees/wires down. Repeat every 50 feet or so.)

We went for a drive later in the day to check things out (well....mostly to charge the phones too, lol) and it's like a goddamned war zone out there. We couldn't even find a way to get into Rhode Island safely because even the main routes are barricaded because of wires in the road, fire trucks and police cars are out everywhere zooming around, etc. I don't even know where they all came from as half the towns around here don't even have their own police department and their fire stations are mostly volunteer only. (My town included. I can hear the sirens go off from here when they are calling people in to deal with a fire.)



Over half the state/close to 800,000 people are without power in this state, 90% outage for this entire northwest quadrant. From what we saw on the roads, it will be a miracle if it's back up before the end of the week. :(

After driving around all over we actually found that the Stop & Shop not too far off was open and operating on generator power.


All the cold stuff had been trucked away because they don't have enough power for those cases but that's JUST FINE BY ME. I am not at ALL prepared food-wise to be out of power for so long. Probably 70% of my diet is reliant on fruits/veggies so this should be a fun week, eating all sorts of processed food crap I never normally get to eat. Lol. (God knows I LIKE a lot of that stuff, like most other Americans, but I've been very good about purging it out of my diet over the last decade or so. Will be an interesting experiment to be thrust back into it all so suddenly again.)

Along those lines, I just went ahead and tossed most of the stuff in my fridge last night, other than the few things I think can survive on the counters for a few days, like apples and salad dressings. (I think I'm going to need the dressings for the cans of tuna seeing as mayo is out. :))

Today is the fun job of trying to see what pitiful few items we can save from the freezers. :( We heard a town up the highway some has power and a couple others further away so we will be on the hunt to find some ice in a little while for the coolers so we can at least save a few things for grilling this week. As far as the rest if it, gosh I just don't know. I only know of one relative, so far, that has power so I'm going to have to make some calls in the car later to see if anyone wants to come up here and grab all the free meat that they want. *sigh*

Which brings me to my last point: I am not answering any emails unless I absolutely have to because, besides having limited battery power for the phone (that I need to sit in a running car for 90 minutes to charge), it's become increasingly obvious that something has happened to the cell phone coverage in this area because I've gone from almost a full signal yesterday morning to it being completely out now. :( I'm actually having to type things out and save them to draft to send until we can get to an area that's more stable. Totally, totally sucks.

After he goes back to work tonight I'm going to be stuck in the house all day with no power, no Internet/phone, no running water, and no freaking car. (Of course we used a local mechanic for his car repairs so it's anyone's guess when we will get THAT back.) Time to put the Big Girl Panties on and suck it up with a smile, I guess. I just need to keep chanting 'first world problem, first world problem, first world problem.....' to myself to keep my spirits up. lol

Could be worse - there *could* be a tree on the house.



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