I hate alarms.

Remember my carbon monoxide alarm debacle from last summer? After that, I went out and dropped some serious dollars on fancy alarms. A carbon monoxide one for the main level of the house and a combo carbon monoxide/ explosive gas one for the basement.

Here’s the thing: we don’t have gas in the house. Getting a line run is a down-the-line project, so I thought I’d be proactive and get the alarm now.

During the power outage, the battery backups in both died. We stole a battery out of one of the smoke detectors to keep the carbon monoxide one going – just in case the generator happened to be getting fumes in the house or something.

My project for the afternoon was to track down new 9-volts to replace the batteries in all of the alarms. (Which ended up costing nearly $30! I had no idea they were so expensive!)

I popped the battery into the carbon monoxide alarm – it beeped a few times and then was happy so I put it back in it’s home. For the combo alarm, I popped the battery in, it beeped a few times like the other one and then started flashing GAS and going off really loudly. I ripped the battery out and took it upstairs, tried it again and had the same result.

Total flashback to last year.

I called Mark and he was just about to leave work so I decided to just wait outside for him to get here. He suggested that I bring the alarm outside and try again, which I did with the same results.

At this point, I was pretty damn sure it was the alarm, not an actual gas leak because a) being out in the open shouldn’t give you a gas reading and b) WE DON’T HAVE GAS.

When Mark got home he tried it again and had the same reaction as me – ripped the battery right out when it started going crazy. We tried everything we could thing of – we vacuumed it, air blasted it. I even shook the hell out of the damn thing.

So, Mark did the smart thing and pulled out the instructions. And you know what? That’s the normal reset procedure. My mind is still kind of boggled that I’m supposed to let it scream for 30 seconds while telling me it’s detecting gas and carbon monoxide. Seriously, who comes up with these things?

I swear, these damn alarms cause me so much anxiety and it’s always for naught. Someone really needs to design an alarm that’s effective but much, much more user friendly.

We have power!

I was pretty much at my breaking point yesterday. When Mark came home from work last night I was crying. I really hadn’t slept very much since the power went out and the stress was just getting to be too much.

Mark talked me down and we decided that if they still weren’t working on the downed line by tonight we’d pack it up and get out of the house for the night. A hot shower and some good sleep.

Yesterday evening, as we were chatting with the neighbors, the street behind us came back online. Do you know how disheartening it is to know the house behind you is nice and lit up while you’re still sitting in the dark?

A little after 4 am, our power came back on too. I couldn’t be happier. The storm finally feels “over” for us and I can’t wait to feel like I’m back in my routine. 

One step forward, two steps back?

I worked from home today. It was nice to feel like things were back to normal for a few hours (with the exception of no CSI marathon in the background, anyway).

I still felt a little guilty about not trying to go in. Until I saw this:

(from PrincetonPatch)

That’s the road I take to work. Or, it used to be a road. The last update I found online said the water still hasn’t fully receded off the roadway and it isn’t open to cars yet.

The police for the town I work in also announced that power may not be fully restored down there until Sunday.

I was ridiculously optimistic this morning. Our localized flooding has all but disappeared. They cut the big tree down on our power lines yesterday so I was sure that meant they’d start repairs today.

My lunchtime outing to get more gas for the generator was sort of a kick in the gut. Not only are they not working on the downed lines on the street over yet, there are more outages today. Several of the traffic lights along the main highway are out, making it difficult to cross back and forth between sides.

It’s disheartening to feel like things are getting worse, not better.

Progress

We have internet! No power yet, but Mark got our Fios all hooked to the generator so we can get online.

Mark’s planning to go to work tomorrow and I was getting a little nervous about what I’d do with my time. I feel like I should be working but I don’t really want to be driving there with the state of the roads. I had it in my head that I could find a wifi hotspot and work from there but trying to find a wifi hotspot today was harder than we imagined – Panera was packed, Barnes and Noble had no available outlets and the library was closed.  Now, with the generator hooked up I’ll be able to work from home tomorrow.

The big tree that we think took out our power is finally being worked on. They cut up and removed the tree today so all you can see in the road is the snapped telephone pole and lots of wires. Hopefully they’ll be able to get repairs going tomorrow.

We also discovered this afternoon that the water in the hot water heater was still quite warm. Who would have thought? We each got to shower tonight without freezing which was a nice surprise.

Really, we’ve got it good. There’s no lights or AC, but we’ve got internet, the fridge and a dry in-tact house. It’s more than a lot of people have tonight.

I’m still a little miserable though. I feel selfish saying that, but it’s true. I really wish this whole thing would just be over.

Irene Update

I’m pre-writing this post a little after 11 am on Monday. Our intention is to find a wifi hotspot this afternoon… if this post seems way delayed, that’s why! I just wanted to start getting my thoughts down.

I guess I’ll start with Saturday. It was incredibly weird on Saturday. Everyone was mostly prepped and staying home. We were prepped and there really wasn’t must to do, so we decided to take a bike ride over to the park. We knew it would likely flood some, so I wanted to take reference picture.

Not the park, but here’s our backyard Saturday afternoon:

This is the park. It’s about three or four blocks from our house. Just to give you some perspective, this is from the road:

Beyond the line of trees you see in the first picture is this field:

And then on the other side of THOSE trees is the river. It’s a fairly good distance between the river and the road at this point – at least a quarter mile, I would guess more.

Our power went out around midnight Saturday night/Sunday morning. I was already asleep – Mark was up. He said shortly after it went out there were flashing lights on the street over.

I woke up around 3 am, realized the power was out and woke up Mark to go check on the basement. We have a sump pump that works beautifully – but this is the first time we’ve lost power. When we went down, the water was starting to pool. We moved the last few things that we’d been too lazy (or optimistic) to move earlier – mostly empty cardboard boxes and went back to bed.

Getting a hurricane is scary enough. Getting it in the middle of the night while your power is out is completely terrifying. I didn’t really sleep much the rest of the night. It’s so nerve-wracking to know your house is flooding and you can’t do anything about it. It was also so dark and the rain was coming down so hard you couldn’t see anything when you looked outside.

Sunday morning we woke up to this:

The water was deep enough to flood out the shed (luckily, Mark had the foresight to move the things with engines, like the lawnmower, up onto pallets so everything was okay). Our neighbors had a canoe out in their backyard and were paddling around. It was sort of crazy.

The water extended up the side of the house and was pooling quite a bit at the end of the driveway too.

Mark went out and unclogged the drain by the road – it had picked up lots of debris – and that helped clear things out a bit.

The basement was nice and soggy. We had about a half inch when I woke up, but it kept seeping in. By Monday morning, we had about 2-3 inches. Again, luckily, everything was raised so I don’t think we lost anything.

When it stopped raining, we hopped on our bikes to see how the rest of the area was fairing. Remember the park from before? This is is Sunday afternoon, from the road:

The other field, the dam – everything else I took pictures of the day before was completely under water.

This is normally the entranceway.

The water was so high it came up over the road. You can’t tell from the picture, but the water had gotten so high it had floated cars onto the roadway. One was completely submerged – you could just see the roof.

So, we turned around and went the other way. This is another side street. You can’t normally see the river from this corner.

For the sake of perspective, that’s a woman standing in the water by the stairs there. This house is next to the road.

This is what we were met with a little further down.

We went around in an attempt to get down further, only to find the river was up over the road again.

We are able to get out of the neighborhood and explored a little more Sunday evening. The grocery store and Home Depot are open so we stopped and got ice to keep the fridge cooler since we were going on 24 hours with no power.

We stopped at CVS too and bought a little armband radio. Neither of us have smartphones so we’ve been feeling really cut off from the world.

The power outages seem to be localized in our subsection of town. The street over has a huge tree down that took out the power lines and telephone pole. As of this morning, they hadn’t even started working on cutting the tree away yet. (Although, I swear I heard a chainsaw a little while ago so I’m praying that’s where it was coming from.)

We spent most of last night on the couch playing board games and listening to a 90s dance party I found on the radio. For dinner, we braved the remaining wind and made a general tso’s chicken stir fry on the grill.

We’ve been keeping in touch with our parents – they all lost power too. My Mom called last night to say their power came back on so my Dad came down this morning and brought us their generator.

I swear, it’s like a little slice of heaven. We hooked up the sump pump and wet vac and we’ve got the basement decently cleaned up and the fridge is plugged in so we don’t have to worry about spoiled food.

We might play around with it a little more later and see if we can power up our cable box with it (I totally missed True Blood last night!) and if not, we should be able to do DVDs.

Clearly, working from home isn’t happening. I was hoping that I’d somehow be able to get into the office tomorrow but I’m not sure if that’s realistic. No matter how you slice it, I have to cross that swollen river and it’s flooded out too many of the roads around here. I’m hoping the library will be open and maybe have some wifi?

Is anyone else dealing with Irene’s aftermath? How are you fairing? As shitty as things seem to be around here, our neighbors have told us Floyd was worse, so we’re counting our blessings.

Moves Like Jagger

For my birthday, Mark got me tickets to see Gavin DeGraw. He is, currently, the only musician I really keep up with – knowing tour dates, pre-ordering albums, etc. He’s fantastic live. This was the third time I’ve seen him and he never disappoints.

Really, he could come sing to me anytime he wants.

But, for this concert Gavin was only the opening act – Maroon 5 and Train played also. We had happened upon a Train concert during Fashion’s Night Out in the city last year, so I knew they’d be good too. I wasn’t super excited about Maroon 5 because I didn’t know what to expect.

Maroon 5 came on after Gavin and really, they were awesome. Super high energy and they did a great job of getting the whole crowd really pumped up.

I’m going to have Moves Like Jagger in my head for weeks, I think. I’d totally go see them again if we had the chance.

Train’s show was very different. Maroon 5 stuck mostly to their singles and went really high-energy. When Train was on stage, they sort of made you feel like you were just chilling with the band.

They did their most popular singles and also some other stuff – their cover of Rihanna’s Umbrella was a crowd favorite.

And, they did a ton of audience interaction. I knew from the Fashion week show that they tweet pictures of the crowd during If It’s Love, but they did something with the audience on nearly every song.

It was an amazingly fun night.

And, Irene actually helped make things easier. The concert venue is right off the Garden State Parkway – the main road to the Jersey shore. On a Friday night in the summer, we were really prepared to sit in a lot of traffic since it’s usually crazy. Last night there was next to no one on the road. It’s good to know people are heeding the warnings – she’s coming up fast.

Prepping

When we were house hunting, I was super careful about checking if houses were in flood plains. I had the flood maps for the the area bookmarked. This house was high and dry.

When we did our home inspection, the inspector found a slight, old waterline in the base of the furnace. He said that it was most likely from Floyd. This area got hit hard – real hard – then. He told us that we’d be hard pressed to find a house in the area that didn’t get water during Floyd, that it was a once-in-a-lifetime storm and not something we should really take into consideration. Everyone else we talked to in the area seemed to echo the same advice. You can’t base decisions on crazy, freak storms.

Yesterday, the news started yelling red alert about Irene. This morning, one of the news articles I read quoted the local Red Cross urging people to “remember Floyd”. Floyd was only a tropical storm when it hit.

I’m sufficiently nervous.

We tried to get our hands on a generator or battery backup to keep our sump pump going in case the power goes out, but no such luck – it was a struggle event to find batteries in stock. It seems everyone else is doing these last-minute chores too.

At this point there’s not much else we can do. We’ll spend some time this afternoon moving stuff up out of the basement, just in case. Then, we’ll just be waiting and hoping things aren’t as bad as they’re anticipating.

Shakin’

I grew up close to a fault line. Every once in a while we’d get a little quake. I also grew up down the street from one of the biggest arsenals on the East Coast – and they would routinely blow things up there. If the house shook, you could never really tell if it was an earthquake or an explosion.

Today was my first “real” earthquake I suppose – in that, I felt it and knew it was an earthquake.

I was in the office today, parked at my desk on the second floor and the building started to sway. It was a weird feeling, like being on a boat. My coworkers and I were all looking around at each other like, did you feel that too?

The perks of working with lots of ex-journalists – they get to the bottom of things quickly. We new there was at least a 5.0 earthquake in VA before it hit CNN and that it was felt all the way up to Boston. There was about ten minutes of excited chatter and then everyone got back to work.

A fifteen minute distraction total. That’s an East Coast style earthquake, I suppose.

I generally appreciate optimism

I like when people can see the best in a situation – even if the best is unlikely. This does not apply to the forecast, though. When it comes to weather, I’d much rather hear it like it is.

In the last 48 hours or so, we’ve gotten about 6.25” of rain according to our rain gauge. That’s a lot of rain.

It made the ground so saturated that my tomato cages sunk into the ground more and then fell over. Mark and I were standing the rain last night trying to rescue the tomato plants. The yard squished when you walk through and any low areas puddled quite a bit.

This afternoon, the weather went from okay to scary in the span of a few minutes. The clouds were going in different directions than they usually do and thunder was rumbling continuously.

I checked the weather online to see if there was anything I should be concerned about and was more than a little surprised that it was telling me it was currently sunny in my city (not true!) and no precipitation was expected through the night (I beg to differ!)

Weathermen, if you put that up to give us false hope, I’m not amused.

I went to the movies yesterday.

Probably sounds like no big deal, right? It was for me.

I’m not a movie person. Even at home, I’m not a huge fan of sitting for two hours watching any one thing. But at the movies it seems even worse – they charge an arm and a leg for overly fatty food and you have to deal with inconsiderate people who talk/text their way through things.

I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been to the movies with Mark (and we’ve been together 7 years).

The last movie I saw in the theater was Sex and the City – the first one – so it’s been about 3 years.

We went to see The Help yesterday. I read the book about a year and a half ago and loved it. It’s easily one of my favorite books. So, I decided I just had to see the movie.

It was fantastic. A really great adaption of the book. We snuck in more reasonable snacks (shhh, don’t tell!) and went to an afternoon showing so things were emptier. It was great. So great, in fact, that it might have convinced me we should do it more often. I’m thinking the last Harry Potter movie will have to be our next one!

Staycationed

Mark and I took a few days off last week for a bit of a summer break. It was plenty busy but a lot of fun.

We went outlet shopping one day and hung out at the pool the next. I spent a good chunk of one morning setting up Blood cancers Suck and another morning we attended our local Light the Night kickoff event.

On Friday, we went down the Adventure Aquarium in Camden. I’ve wanted to go there for years but we never got the chance so I was super excited to finally get to check it out.

Of course, I loved the penguins best.

The other exhibits were great too. There was an African exhibit with birds. This sign totally cracked us up.

The same exhibit had hippos! One of them came over to say hi.

The penguins got the most attention, though. They totally rushed the door because they knew it was dinner time. Adorable.

And those are their sleeping holes. They were all chilling in them our first time through.

Our weekend was pretty average – all of our usual chores and errands. The garden is getting to a point where we can’t eat everything (especially the tomatoes) before they go bad. And the big tomatoes are ripening. They’re really big.

I see a lot of tomato sauce in my future.

July Reads

I can’t believe we’re almost a week into August already!

July was a good reading month. I read:

Revelations, The Van Alen Legacy and Misguided Angel – I spent a good part of the beginning of them month laying out back in the hammock devouring these. It’s such a fun series. (And, we’ve got signed copies of Revelations and The Van Alen Legacy up for auction as part of Blood Cancers Suck!)

A Visit from the Goon Squad – This is a collection of intertwined short stories. It was okay but I’m not such a fan of short stories because I never feel like I get to know the characters enough.

Hidden Wives – This was a fictional account of girls in an abusive polygamist sect. It was both enthralling and really disturbing.

Real Murders – I like everything by Charlaine Harris so this was no exception. I didn’t love it as much as other series though which is probably most evident because I didn’t immediately go to the next in the series.

Predictably Irrational – I often hear the author on NPR and he always fascinates me so I knew I would like this book. Even though it’s basically a rehash of his psychological experiments, it wasn’t dry at all. I loved it.

Matched – This was probably my favorite of the month. I listened to it as an audiobook and often found myself staring at my laptop “watching” everything play out. Everything was so vivid and the characters were so believable and lovable. I can’t wait to read the next in the series.

What did you read in July?

Vampire book auctions to raise money for Light the Night

I’m so incredibly proud of this project.

For the past few months I’ve been contacting authors and getting things organized; today Blood Cancers Suck went live.

It’s a series of vampire-themed auctions and all of the proceeds will benefit the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society via their Light the Night walk.

We’ve got a ton of great stuff up for grabs, including books signed by Christopher Moore, Charlaine Harris and Lara Adrian. There’s also a few Alexander Skarsgard autographs.

You can check out everything here: http://booksforbloodcancers.blogspot.com/

If you’d help spread the word, I’d be grateful!

This happens every weekend.

Okay, not every weekend put at least one weekend a year. This past weekend was the Quick Check Balloon Festival at one of the close-by airfields.

Last year, we had only been in the house a few weeks when the festival happened and woke up to a woooooosh sound. When we opened our blinds we saw a hot air balloon about a block or two over, just above the houses.

This year, the balloons showed up again. Apparently our neighborhood is in their flight line.

It’s really neat to watch them float by – they’re faster than you think!

Part of the festival is a mass ascension each morning and evening. The hills and trees by our house hide these, so Sunday night we went up to a higher vantage point – Wegman’s parking lot – to see what we could see.

It started out pretty unexciting. Two. And that was it.

But pretty soon the skyline filled up with balloons.

And as the angle of the sun changed, you could see their colors better.

See that rectangle one in the mix? It’s totally a Pepsi can!

I think next year we’re going to have to actually go to the festival and see everything up close.