The things The Storm taught us

Bowie ready for the next storm

After The Storm, the rest of our neighborhood had power restored within the rest of the week and everything went back to normal, for the most part.  There is still debris that litters the side of the road and city services has yet to come by and carry away all of the fallen branches, which makes it feel a little like a false fall with crunching dead leaves under foot on the sidewalks.

Weather is the universal conversation starter so of course, we’re all still talking about it The Storm and interestingly enough, all of the conversations have had a positive slant.  I’ve discussed how we got lucky not having any damage to our property or vehicles but I’ve also realized in the past few weeks that there are some general life lessons that we could take away from the entire experience:

Turn off the tv and get out of the house.  We cut the cord years ago and haven’t missed having cable.  Okay so we’re guilty of having a TV antenna in our attic so Bryan was able to watch playoff hockey.  Still, we spend the majority of our evenings reading instead of watching tv.  During the power outage, we planted vegetables, watered plants, and weeded the flower beds.  And then once it got dark, we generally just went to sleep instead of fiddling around on our phones, which leads to the next lesson...

Put the phone down.  This is probably a good lesson for life in general.  Trying to preserve phone battery life for emergencies only, we weren’t on our phones texting as much or looking at dumb things on Instagram.  Not surprisingly, we didn’t really miss anything.  Not pictures of food that someone else ate nor pictures of a vacation that someone else went on.

Look for helpers and be a helper.  One of our neighbors down the street ran a power strip from his generator to his front porch and invited everyone in the neighborhood to come over and charge their devices.  Those with chainsaws reached out to anyone who needed help clearing branches from their yards.  Folks expressed gratitude to the out of state emergency power crews that swooped in from all over the country to try and get things back to working order as swiftly as possible.  The minor convenience of having the power out was outweighed by the stories of friends / family who hosted sleepovers for those without AC and neighbors who helped clear tree trunks from others’ yards.  I’d never experienced such a sense of neighborly camaraderie before.

If you won’t eat it, don’t keep it.  After dumping the contents of our fridge and freezer and scrubbing the entire thing clean, I was surprised to find we didn’t really have to restock much when the power came back.  Which meant a lot of the food we had in our fridge was taking up space and we never ever intended to eat it.  Keep your fridge clean and the contents to a minimum.  The only thing we were desperate to replace was the ice cream that had melted during the days after the storm.

Get storm ready when you can.  This past weekend, we had another severe thunderstorm warning on Sunday and yet another last night.  We are supposed to get some more bad weather over the coming weekend again.  Bryan charged up the flashlight batteries and power bank immediately after we got power back.  We know where all the candles are and have bottles of water stocked up.  I know all of the short cuts and side streets that avoid major intersections where traffic lights went out.  I’m hopeful that we don’t get anything nearly as bad as what we got two weeks ago but I also know that if / when it happens, we’ll be prepared.