At Home with Sandy

It's been raining hard for hours and the wind has really started to blow.   My typing is accompanied by the clank, clank, clank of the steel wind chime outside our porch.  For the moment we are cozy at home, all three of us, since not only the schools but the federal government has closed for today and tomorrow.  We are told over and over again that we WILL lose power, so we've made sure to eat really well, cooking up salmon with shrimp (last night) and chicken and pesto salad (this afternoon), and have baked chocolate chip cookies to tide us over once the power actually goes out and we've eaten all the ice cream and fudge bars in the freezer.

Last night after Paul's flute lesson, we played Apples to Apples with his teacher, the fabulous Mrs. D,  and her boyfriend, which was quite fun.  Once the power goes out, I'm looking forward to playing again and read by the light of our many battery operated lanterns, at least until the winds and rains die down and we get the generator up and running.  Until then, though, we are enjoying our many electronics, surfing the web for news and watching "On Demand" movies on our TV.

While we are safe at home, we watch with some anxiety the waters surging towards many areas that we know and love.  The boardwalk in Cape May, the parks and streets of lower Manhattan (where we are scheduled to go in two weeks),  the Maryland and Delaware beaches,  and the rivers which meet the Chesapeake Bay and house the West River retreat center, the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center camp, and the Annapolis harbor, are all threatened by the rising waters.