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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2dQX30K:cruelsunflower replied to your post “Somehow, despite all the in-family hullabaloo about Hurricane Hermine,…”
I hope everyone stays safe!
magickedteacup said: hope your family is okay during the storm :O
Sister said she was quite anxious last night after the evacuation order came, because “I like to do what I’m told!”, but her disaster plan is to get to her in-laws’, and they live in Baton Rouge, which at best is ten and a half hours in a minivan with three small children and two large elderly Springer Spaniels, and two cats left abandoned back at the house (who the neighbors would look out for, but if the worst came to pass, who knows what would become of them, but they cannot go in that car with those dogs), and she looked on Google Maps and all of the possible routes were just completely bedazzled with those little yellow exclamation marks that say “Traffic Incident”, and she thought, my God, that’s going to be probably eighteen hours in a minivan with no second driver since her husband’s called up with the Guard, and there’s really nowhere closer she could go with all those kids and the dogs.
She sent another picture, but I don’t want to just copy all her photos over here, and this one has the kids’ faces, so. It’s her living room, the floor totally covered with air mattresses, adorned with two small boys and a tiny girl (I couldn’t see her among the pillows at first); they spent the day having toy gun battles with the neighbors, but came inside when the rain picked up. Two inches of rain so far, and the wind’s coming up now. They still have power, so they’re watching TV until their brains rot, with every lamp in the house switched on, while that lasts, and my sister’s baking cookies and being thankful she’s not rotting in traffic with a minivan full of dependents.
She could’ve done it; she’s a logistics expert. I’m sure she had stuff ready to go. She’s always prepared for stuff. But the kids were already in bed when the order came, long in bed, asleep, and the highways were already nuts, and it was already raining, and they’d said before that only the southern half of the county should evacuate…
She says the kids got overzealous and filled about every container she owns with water. They have two bathtubs full of water, they have pots full of water, they have buckets full of water, they have cups and Rubbermaid totes full of water. When we were little kids the power used to go out a lot– we lived pretty far out on a spur of the power line, so if anything went wrong it took us down– and we got really used to that; I’ve lived my whole life with an absent-minded background plan for what to do if the power goes out. But Sister doesn’t have a gas stove, which was the thing that really got us through, or the big Coleman lantern I have such weird visceral sense memories of (I never understood that it was pressurized gas through a mantle that made it so bright and so loud; I’m still not totally sure how it works, but it would sit on the kitchen table and hiss and cast shadows on the wall, white as a noon sun, and we could read the paper by it). But they camp a lot, and are used to adventures, so while maybe all of us adults are scared, the kids aren’t at all. They think this is a great time.
I guess I have more sympathy for the people who refuse to evacuate than I did before I really thought of it. It’s hard, to get out. And I’m right in thinking they haven’t had to worry about this in the last decade. Maybe Brother-in-Law, who’s a native of Mississippi and lived in Louisiana most of his youth, has more experience, but we grew up in the Northeast, where you never evacuate for storms, you shelter in place because duh it’s snowing. That’s the Extreme Weather we get: blizzards. We have no idea what to do with hurricanes and tornadoes and that kind of thing. We make plans that involve huddling in your house, and always keep emergency supplies in our cars in case we’re stranded. We don’t know how to evacuate. We don’t know how to think like that.
(Come to think of it I’ve sheltered in place against tornadoes. We’ve had two, in my lifetime. One of which, I was overseas during, and a friend was looking at the back page of the Edinburgh newspaper where the Miscellaneous News From Elsewhere was, and said “huh do you know where Mechanicville NY is?” and I said “why, that’s very close to my house, a couple miles away,” and she said, “they had an F4 tornado destroy 200 houses last week,” and I said, “that’s ridiculous, New York doesn’t have tornadoes,” and grabbed the paper, and about passed out. My mother hadn’t called me because she figured I wouldn’t hear about it so she’d just tell me during our monthly phone call. There wasn’t really an Internet then, to speak of.)
Ha Sister just sent a follow-up picture: the dogs have arrived and taken over the beds, so now the two boys are both in the recliner and the little girl is snuggling one of the dogs.
I hope everyone stays safe!
magickedteacup said: hope your family is okay during the storm :O
Sister said she was quite anxious last night after the evacuation order came, because “I like to do what I’m told!”, but her disaster plan is to get to her in-laws’, and they live in Baton Rouge, which at best is ten and a half hours in a minivan with three small children and two large elderly Springer Spaniels, and two cats left abandoned back at the house (who the neighbors would look out for, but if the worst came to pass, who knows what would become of them, but they cannot go in that car with those dogs), and she looked on Google Maps and all of the possible routes were just completely bedazzled with those little yellow exclamation marks that say “Traffic Incident”, and she thought, my God, that’s going to be probably eighteen hours in a minivan with no second driver since her husband’s called up with the Guard, and there’s really nowhere closer she could go with all those kids and the dogs.
She sent another picture, but I don’t want to just copy all her photos over here, and this one has the kids’ faces, so. It’s her living room, the floor totally covered with air mattresses, adorned with two small boys and a tiny girl (I couldn’t see her among the pillows at first); they spent the day having toy gun battles with the neighbors, but came inside when the rain picked up. Two inches of rain so far, and the wind’s coming up now. They still have power, so they’re watching TV until their brains rot, with every lamp in the house switched on, while that lasts, and my sister’s baking cookies and being thankful she’s not rotting in traffic with a minivan full of dependents.
She could’ve done it; she’s a logistics expert. I’m sure she had stuff ready to go. She’s always prepared for stuff. But the kids were already in bed when the order came, long in bed, asleep, and the highways were already nuts, and it was already raining, and they’d said before that only the southern half of the county should evacuate…
She says the kids got overzealous and filled about every container she owns with water. They have two bathtubs full of water, they have pots full of water, they have buckets full of water, they have cups and Rubbermaid totes full of water. When we were little kids the power used to go out a lot– we lived pretty far out on a spur of the power line, so if anything went wrong it took us down– and we got really used to that; I’ve lived my whole life with an absent-minded background plan for what to do if the power goes out. But Sister doesn’t have a gas stove, which was the thing that really got us through, or the big Coleman lantern I have such weird visceral sense memories of (I never understood that it was pressurized gas through a mantle that made it so bright and so loud; I’m still not totally sure how it works, but it would sit on the kitchen table and hiss and cast shadows on the wall, white as a noon sun, and we could read the paper by it). But they camp a lot, and are used to adventures, so while maybe all of us adults are scared, the kids aren’t at all. They think this is a great time.
I guess I have more sympathy for the people who refuse to evacuate than I did before I really thought of it. It’s hard, to get out. And I’m right in thinking they haven’t had to worry about this in the last decade. Maybe Brother-in-Law, who’s a native of Mississippi and lived in Louisiana most of his youth, has more experience, but we grew up in the Northeast, where you never evacuate for storms, you shelter in place because duh it’s snowing. That’s the Extreme Weather we get: blizzards. We have no idea what to do with hurricanes and tornadoes and that kind of thing. We make plans that involve huddling in your house, and always keep emergency supplies in our cars in case we’re stranded. We don’t know how to evacuate. We don’t know how to think like that.
(Come to think of it I’ve sheltered in place against tornadoes. We’ve had two, in my lifetime. One of which, I was overseas during, and a friend was looking at the back page of the Edinburgh newspaper where the Miscellaneous News From Elsewhere was, and said “huh do you know where Mechanicville NY is?” and I said “why, that’s very close to my house, a couple miles away,” and she said, “they had an F4 tornado destroy 200 houses last week,” and I said, “that’s ridiculous, New York doesn’t have tornadoes,” and grabbed the paper, and about passed out. My mother hadn’t called me because she figured I wouldn’t hear about it so she’d just tell me during our monthly phone call. There wasn’t really an Internet then, to speak of.)
Ha Sister just sent a follow-up picture: the dogs have arrived and taken over the beds, so now the two boys are both in the recliner and the little girl is snuggling one of the dogs.
