Preparedness Plans

My spouse went to bed early last night, and I decided to have some Friday night fun revising my story.  I had set it in an earlier time and a different place than it needed to be for the story to fit in my linked short story collection.  I thought I might be able to tinker and make it work.  I was eager to see if I could--and these days, I want to get the writing task done before too much time goes by, and I lose the vision of what I planned to do.

Some people go out dancing on Friday nights, while others go to high school football games.  I had a successful writing/revising night. I slept soundly.  In these days before the storms in the Atlantic get close enough to disturb my sleep, it's good to have the sleep.

I saw this text on Dr. Jeff Masters' blog post on the weatherunderground site: "All interests along the U.S. East Coast from Florida to New England should monitor closely the forecast of Florence. If you live in a hurricane-prone location, now is a good time to make sure you have a preparedness plan in place."

A preparedness plan. Hmm. With our home repairs from last year's Hurricane Irma currently in high gear, I can scarcely find clean clothes, let along things like flashlights and batteries. As we get ready for the second half of the Great Flooring Project, let me keep track of the canned goods as we move them out of the kitchen.

And I'm being partly facetious. I do know where the batteries are--but with the exception of one battery operated lantern, I don't know where the lanterns and battery operated fans are.

Of course, last year, I did a lot of reading by the light of the autumnal trees, lit by batteries, that I bought just before the week of hurricane Irma prep.  

Those are safely in my office, along with the Christmas tree that I have for seasonal office decorations (and a basket of Easter eggs, and a sprig of fake flowers, and a small flag). I don't think that Dr. Jeff Masters had those in mind when he talks of a storm preparedness plan.

But it's too early to do much hurricane prep now; of course, I have the luxury of saying that because we have some of the prep done.  We keep canned goods on hand, we have sandbags, we have shutters, we have bottles that we'll fill with water if it looks like one of these storms is headed our way.

For this week-end, we'll be focused on the final moving of everything out of the second half of the house and strategizing a kitchen remodel.  And I'll keep an eye on the weather sites, because that's what we do when we live in hurricane country.