Irene?

Guess what? Apparently Hurricane Irene is big news all over the world. I got a phone call from my brother today. He's stationed in Turkey. The local news had a 10 minute segment on how armageddon is facing New York City and doom will spread all over the East Coast. My poor sister-in-law, who has never seen a hurricane, but who has lived through several severe earthquakes, was frantic with worry for the family over here. It took me several minutes to convince her that here in Boston, we don't have any need to evacuate (at least not with the current situation as we know it).

Irene is a front page story in the London Times and the lead story on the BBC news page.

I had no idea this would rate more than a paragraph in the paper or 30 seconds on the news in other countries. There is, you know, actual news coming from places like Libya and Syria.

Yeah, well, when NYC has to shut down mass transit AND has mandatory evacuations (a friend of mine had to evacuate), I'm not surprised it made big news overseas.

I'm in NW NJ, so although we're not directly in the center of the storm and away from the coast, we're probably going to get lots of flooding. My neighboring town (Belvidere, Warren County) is on the Delaware River and that often floods--a real shame, since it's a cute Victorian town. We're in a condo development, and there's a creek running behind us, which has never overflowed since we've been here--yet. The threat of high winds scares me because there are a lot of tall, old trees everywhere and most heavy storms cause broken limbs, resulting in downed wires and loss of power.

Our unit faces mostly north, and we usually miss being hit full-force by most storms. Our old house is in central Jersey, which will be hit harder.

In all my 45 years, I don't remember having so many warnings about a storm before; we've never been hit directly and we usually only get the fringes of most tropical storms and hurricanes. Then again, we didn't have The Weather Channel years ago. Who knew watching weather could be so engrossing.

I'm glad this is being taken seriously. It'll be interesting to see how NYC fares; never in my life have I heard of the city being shut down before (except after 9/11, of course).

We're not too prepared here--lots of water in the fridge, candles, flashlights and food. I'm sure the power will be out at least overnight and Sunday. It's 9pm now and the rain is definitely coming down harder and the wind is picking up. The worst is supposed to be from midnight until Sunday afternoon.

On my way home from work today I stopped by the barn to give my pony a big kiss---hope he doesn't blow away!!!

On Friday Anderson Cooper (LOVE him!!!) was broadcasting from Battery Park and he mentioned that he had rats running around his feet. Perhaps they sense the coming storm and were emigrating uptown!

My area made it through OK--it wasn't as bad here as some other areas. Flooding is still expected over the next few days. There was one small tree down in the house part of our development, lots of leaves everywhere too. Now it's just very very windy.

How did everyone else do??

We did ok. Lots of debris and limbs down, but not whole trees. Localized flooding. Power was out here for 22 hours. A neighboring village is expecting power to be restored in 14 days!!!!