So yeah. That Hurricane Sandy thing happened. I figure I can break some writing rust talking about it.

As many of you know, I live in northern New Jersey. I’m just on the border into New York. Word of Hurricane Sandy brewing came maybe a week and a half prior and the talk at work was how it was supposed to be worse than the storm from the Perfect Storm. I chose not to really take it seriously and instead made jokes about George Clooney. As it got closer and my boss became a bit more wary on us being open for certain days, there was still a bit of denial in there. One of my coworkers figured that in situations like this, the supermarket chains pay the weather channels to sensationalize everything so more people go on food shopping sprees.

As it got closer and closer, the reality started to set in some more. Especially when on Sunday night, the district manager called our store to say not to open on Monday at all. Keep in mind, the storm wasn’t supposed to kick in until 6pm on Monday. I guess they were just afraid of people coming in for the early shift and then being stranded in the mall when it was time to go.

I at least prepared enough. I got extra food. I loaded my tablet with movies and CHIKARA shows. I stayed glued to all the weather stuff on TV. On the Weather Channel Sunday night, it made it seem REALLY bad. The next day, watching local affiliates, it seemed less bad. Mainly because there was some kind of big CONE OF DESTRUCTION or whatever they were calling it that was going to cause the most trouble and my county was outside of that direct path. As I sat there with my dad, watching the storm start up outside, we figured that if things hold out for just a couple hours, we’d be all right. That optimism faltered when I’d watch the news and see them have multiple technical difficulties every other minute.

The power cut out at 7:30pm.

I still have two major storms fresh in my mind, both from last year. There was Hurricane Irene and that nasty Halloween snow storm. Irene wasn’t really all that bad outside of cutting out the power for so long. I went to sleep with the power on, woke up with the power off, walked outside and the weather was absolutely beautiful. Sure, there were twigs littering the street, but everything had dried up by that point and you’d hardly even believe that there was a drop of rain. The snow storm was a bad trip because it was too early for there to be snow. All the trees still had leaves and they acted like catcher’s mitts, holding onto more snow and weighing down trees to dangerous extents. That ended up causing far more damage than Irene did. Plus having no heat when there’s mountains of snow outside is a minus on its own.

Waking up on Tuesday, there was good news and bad news. The good news was that the storm had passed, going against the warnings from the news that it would be a 36-hour situation. It rained on and off that day, but nothing worth worrying about. The bad news was that it didn’t share the same, “Oh, there was a storm?” aftermath of Hurricane Irene. With Sandy, the sky was still dark with clouds and the streets looked just a little bit post-apocalyptic.

This tree fell two houses down from me. The homeowner was lucky that he/she moved the cars up so far. I walked around for a couple hours, mainly to see if I could get some kind of cell phone signal. I wasn’t getting too much luck, so I’d turn my phone off for six hours at a time, since roaming for a signal caused it to drain too easily. The streets were filled with threes tearing down phone lines and I saw a couple trees buried into the nearby houses. There were also exposed wires on the sidewalks and other pitfalls.

Read the rest of this entry �