Good Night, Irene
Well, it really looks like Irene is determined to cut a swath on up the eastern seaboard. In fact, at first I thought I'd made the incredibly bright move of planning a mini-holiday to Boston when it was expecting to be hit by a hurricane and now it seems much more likely to affect Philadelphia.
The last big one we had here was Floyd, in 1999, which caused damage to our bay window and the plaster inside it that we still haven't gotten around to repairing, although we fixed the outside of the house to keep more water from coming in. The plaster is on my Master List of House Stuff that we can actually afford to fix now, but you can't just wave a wand and repair everything at once; you need to get the contractor in to look at each job, price it out, etc. It would be nice if getting out of debt immediately meant no longer letting the house slide downhill, but dealing with twenty years of deferred maintenance is quite the time-consuming job and this stuff doesn't happen overnight, even once you can pay the bills.
But I digress. I fully expect to have a house to come home to, since it's a rowhouse and even Hurricane Floyd didn't take out any rowhouses, but I also expect to find a freaked and distressed husband, nervous and jumpy cats and possibly a reason to call the roofer again. :sigh: With luck Chris won't lose electrical power; it really depends on where the tree limbs fall when they start flying around. Everything here is very much above-ground and quite vulnerable to weather like this.
Irene will, of course, bring more comments in various online forums about it all being The Judgment of God. (I could NOT believe how many of those I saw posted as comments on earthquake stories earlier this week.) It would be great* if the whole thing just stayed out to sea, but in case it doesn't, batten down the hatches, everyone, stay safe, and don't let the weather judge you, it's our job to judge IT. ;)
* Well, you know, unless you're out on the Atlantic in a boat.
The last big one we had here was Floyd, in 1999, which caused damage to our bay window and the plaster inside it that we still haven't gotten around to repairing, although we fixed the outside of the house to keep more water from coming in. The plaster is on my Master List of House Stuff that we can actually afford to fix now, but you can't just wave a wand and repair everything at once; you need to get the contractor in to look at each job, price it out, etc. It would be nice if getting out of debt immediately meant no longer letting the house slide downhill, but dealing with twenty years of deferred maintenance is quite the time-consuming job and this stuff doesn't happen overnight, even once you can pay the bills.
But I digress. I fully expect to have a house to come home to, since it's a rowhouse and even Hurricane Floyd didn't take out any rowhouses, but I also expect to find a freaked and distressed husband, nervous and jumpy cats and possibly a reason to call the roofer again. :sigh: With luck Chris won't lose electrical power; it really depends on where the tree limbs fall when they start flying around. Everything here is very much above-ground and quite vulnerable to weather like this.
Irene will, of course, bring more comments in various online forums about it all being The Judgment of God. (I could NOT believe how many of those I saw posted as comments on earthquake stories earlier this week.) It would be great* if the whole thing just stayed out to sea, but in case it doesn't, batten down the hatches, everyone, stay safe, and don't let the weather judge you, it's our job to judge IT. ;)
* Well, you know, unless you're out on the Atlantic in a boat.