In other news, Hurricane Sandy has been bearing down on us all day. It started to rain Sunday afternoon, and get really windy after dusk on Sunday evening. By this morning, the wind had picked up but it didn't rattle the windows until noon or so.
The college where I work canceled classes today and tomorrow, so I basically get two paid days off. That's one of the best things about working for a school - snow/hurricane days. The second best thing is getting the week off (paid) between Christmas and New Year's, as well as a four-day weekend for Easter. That's because we're also a Catholic school.
It's funny that today was my first ever hurricane day. I lived in Florida for five years, and never got one. Tropical Storm Fay was the worst tropical weather we ever got in those five years, and since the highway system wanted people to evacuate, they made all the tolls in the state free that day. So what did we do? Went to the outlets in Orlando where tolls normally are $10 roundtrip. It was awesome, but everyone else had the same idea, so the outlets were so packed.
My dad has been working on replacing the back half of our roof for several weeks now. It gets dark so early these days, so he has been doing a bulk of the work over the weekends. However, Dad came down with the plague (or a bad cold/flu) on Monday. Actually, my brother and I kinda thought he was dead. Dad wakes up at 4 a.m. every weekday, and maybe sleeps in till 5 on the weekends, or 6 if he's really tired or if it's rainy or snowy outside. So when I got up at 7 a.m. and realized the dogs hadn't been out yet and that Dad hadn't gotten out of bed yet, I panicked. I knocked on his door and heard this awful-sounding, "Yeahhhh...?" I asked if he was OK, and then Shaggy started going bananas, but I breathed a sigh of relief. Turns out he was still within the two week period after his flu shot so he wasn't protected yet, and he is still fighting something nasty. I assume it's the flu because I'm still healthy - I got a flu shot but cold shots don't exist yet.
Regardless, Dad decided to get back on the roof this weekend to make sure our house didn't leak when Sandy rolled into town. We also spent several hours on Friday and Saturday, and all day Sunday, raking leaves. I think we filled all nine barrels five or six times over while making trips to and from the town's leaf dump. If you looked at our lawn today, you'd never know we raked a single leaf...until you looked at anyone else's yard on the street. Sandy isn't helping. A lot of branches were killed during the October snowstorm last year but never fell down so every time the wind blows hard, one comes crashing down either directly into the ground like a spear, or bouncing off the roof first, sending me into heart attack mode thinking the ceilings are caving in.
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| Storm prep |
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