the weekend in review

Unless you live under a rock, you know the east coast was hit by hurripane-in-my-[beep] Irene over the weekend.

After a day of raining buckets, our basement flooded with nearly six inches of water. The next morning, I was at least thankful we still had power.

So I began to make Hayden his daily spinach and cheese omelet, with a side of waffle (or french toast). Soon enough the toaster went ding, but the eggs were still cooking. Then we lost power.

Having no other choice, I left the eggs on the stove in the still-hot pan, and begged them to finish cooking. It wasn't looking promising because I still had to flip them. But thanks to our electric stove (that I may have insulted once or twice), the burners take too long to cool so therefore the omelet finished cooking. Although if it was a gas stove it wouldn't have been an issue during a power outage in the first place. 

While Hayden was eating his breakfast, I proactively filled one of the bathtubs with water (per my father's suggestion). We do have public water as opposed to well water, but if the outage was throughout the whole area it was possible they'd have to shutdown the pump(s).

At some point when Dan was outside trying to get whatever water he could out of the basement, an enormous tree fell in our neighbors yard. The sudden and LOUD noise scared the four-letter-word out of Dan and Hayden, but thankfully the 'ol forest timber just missed our fence.

A few hours later we still had water, but then a conservation was put in effect by order of the township. I instinctively went to check on the bathtub, and discovered our drain is apparently literal even when closed.

With that, we decided to get out of the house and find lunch for Hayden.

We drove to three different places before we found one open for lunch, and while we were there the restaurant lost power. By that night, I was packing up me & H to head to my parents house.

We drove an hour, got off the exit, and couldn't turn where we needed to because there was a fire. So we waited for my Dad to meet us and lead me along back roads-- which included driving through a flood zone.

We were at my parents house maybe a couple of hours when a text came in from Dan that the power was back on.

So the following morning we sat in highway traffic for what seemed like a day, to journey home. When you live in Jersey I think you become an unofficial authority on traffic. Aside from car accidents, you've got everything from absurd rain-traffic, to annoying sun glare, to frustrating rubber-necking, or some road that is inexcusably forever under construction.

But the road-closure traffic is arguably the worst kind. The ripple effect is insane.

Why am I blogging about this?

Well, between the yo-yo of waiting and rushing and all the out-of-routineness mixed in, I must brag about the way Hayden handled himself through all of these circumstances.

Rarely did his smile leave his face, and overall he honestly just went with the flow. There were some isolated meltdowns, but when it was all said and done the only memorable natural disaster I witnessed was named Irene.