Me & Irene

Irene has not had a significant impact on me & my family as of yet. All she has done is mess up our weekend plans. My parents were meant to go away for the weekend because it is their anniversary, which would have meant I would have the house to myself and was going to go magazine shopping and then dance around playing Florence + the Machine really loud/do my laundry. (Also I was going to have to cover an event on Saturday for work, but it got cancelled. Woo!)

But instead we found ourselves hunkering down. In the morning, my dad and I brought all the lawn furniture and hanging plants into the garage along with the trash bins. My parents recently murdered two of the trees in our yard, so we didn't have to worry as much about falling branches as the rest of the neighborhood. While my dad dealt with our compost bin (so smelly!!!!) I went around collecting all the nicest flowers in the garden before they all got blown to hell. Our marigolds have been especially gorgeous this year:
The rain started mid-afternoon and didn't really get bad until after dinnertime. I spent the day drinking tea, making random attempts to clean my room, watching the first three episodes of State of Play, surfing the net for articles about Florence Welch, eating the mountain of bagels my dad had brought home from his TA orientation on Friday, putting a poster of The Sound of Music back on the wall because it fell down on Wednesday, discovering that with my new haircut I could do this:and having my mom explain to me how much my car insurance was going to cost me this year.

By about 11pm, I decided to stop watching Midsommer Murders on netflix and get ready for bed. My parents laughed in my face when I told them I was going to sleep, because apparently it was going to be impossible to sleep through the hurricane. They instead were planning to raid my dvd collection and stay up all night watching movies.

I decided to get in bed and read Stephen Fry's book on poetry, "The Ode Less Traveled" now that I had a new snazzy light for my bed. Also, reading poetry sounded like a highbrow thing to do on a stormy night. I got into bed. Turned on my light. Opened the book to the first chapter. And the power went out.

Unwilling to read by candle light and set my pillows alight, I grumpily went to sleep. My window was shaking like the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw was trying to get in, but that didn't seem to trouble my sleep. What did end up troubling my sleep turned out not to be any weather-related phenomenon, but rather my parents watching Stardust.

This morning, things are still pretty much the same. Tea & bagels.

Apparently there is lots of flooding and power outages going on around us, but we are pretty much fine except for lots of wet leaves everywhere and broken branches up and down the street. We lost power two times during the night, and we can't really drive anywhere without encountering closed roads, but that's all. I actually recklessly went outside to check on the garden for a minute and did not come at all close to being blown away. The lawn was very soupy, but it was actually rather nice out, if blustery. My parents warned me not to be fooled. So I canceled my plans to go backpacking. I guess I'll do some online shopping instead.