The right and wrong way to handle yourself in a wind storm

A movie theater! Yeah, a large mostly empty old dollar theater with no basement. Schmmmmmart.

Get Smart. Dumb movie. Doesn't deserve any more than that.

My shoe just got blown off! Would have blown off my socks had I been wearing any! Wild.

Fountain water being blown out of the fountain and pine needles being blown into our faces. It was fun for a few minutes but then we had trouble standing upright and large sheets of something like cardboard or plywood starting flying past our heads.

Then a street light blew over. Ep! Thinking maybe we should go home.

Lots of trees down.

Look, we're missing some roof.

Oh, there are the shingles.

And debris... and colorful cars. Spiffy.

And no power in the apartment. No way to make dinner. Maybe we should go out and drive across town without street lights and over fallen trees and try to find a restaurant with power to eat at. Long story made shorter, the roads were blocked off by police officers and the only restaurant in town that had power was Red Lobster. And husband doesn't eat fish or steak.

After an hour wait...

He was bored but smiley and black and white because in Red Lobster, all photos came out very red and man-that-lives-on-the-sun colored.

I was deep in shirimp/lobster/clams/crab/all-of-the-above heaven. Can't decide, want it all.

Husband just ate about 12 servings of chicken tenders.

By around the 7th chicken tender I got a call from the hotel letting me know that we are without power and going to be closing down and moving 200+ guests and I need to come into work at 4am.

Gah?!?

Yeah.

So we ran home, fumbled around the apartment by candle light, as we don't own a flashlight, then went to bed. Without a fan. Without aircon. Next to a man born in the tropics. I broiled... for about an hour before I had to wake up.

Unless you've been there, it is impossible to imagine what 4am at a powered-down empty hotel is like. It's hard enough to be awake at 4am, but try to stay awake in the dark... in the quiet... with no TV, no computer, no coffee... good lord. I tried to psych myself out with thoughts of crazy killers popping out from dark stairwells. That was my savior.

After about five hours the it was light enough outside to brighten up the lobby through the skylights. The library there? That's how dark (so much darker) the rest of the hotel is. We had to pee by the light of a key chain flash light. While someone decided the chandler is an "emergency light" and should be run by the generator, they didn't care about those poor people stuck in the hotel who may need to pee.

Check out the outside, though.

Ouch.

And so ends the story of why you should own a little charcoal grill, a few flash lights, know where your hand powered radio is, live in a place without so many trees and turn your phone off when you go to dinner.