Well, I'm writing this on the first full day that I've had both power and Internet. It's been a long ten days! We were very lucky, considering that our house was right on the water, to have had no damage, and I would take a little power interruption over damage anytime. However, when the cell towers started fading and my Blackberry stopped working, and I had to think about whether I wanted to do a training run if I couldn't take a shower, and we had our third meal of packaged Indian eggplant curry in a row, we did start dreaming about electricity! There was a lot of damage in our neighborhood, but fortunately no one got hurt. Because the weather was exceptionally beautiful last week, an amazing amount of cleanup got done in a short time. The crew that turned on our power came from Ohio, and others I know welcomed crews from Canada, Kansas, and other far-flung places.
The whole experience reminds us how powerful weather can be. We saw buckled parking lots and patios, smashed garage doors and broken seawalls, all from water at high tide. The wind did far less damage around us than the tide did. Roads washed out and kept us home, reading by flashlight.
The calm after the storm includes closings. Some of the banks are requiring that things set to close get reappraised. I cannot imagine why, as any buyer would check before he/she plunked down money; that would seem to be protection enough. Regulation comes to everything, and, where it doesn't, the opposite of common sense seems to prevail. In the end, we had no closings cancelled after Hurricane Gloria, so let's hope that Tropical Storm Irene proves to be the same.
And let's give a cheer for power!
