Irene

One on the downsides to living near the sea..... Hurricanes. It's been YEARS since Maine has had a really good hurricane. The weather men are comparing this one to a hurricane in 1944 and saying it's stronger than hurricane Bob which is the only "real" hurricane I can remember. We get a lot of tropical storms because once they hit land in Florida or the Carolinas they break up and get cold and just become a real strong rain and wind storm. I've heard our current storm Irene could do the same thing and be a tropical storm once it hits us, but I have also heard because our water in New England is so warm this time of year that we could still be hit by a category 1 or 2 hurricane. To be on the safe side I ran to the grocery store this morning and got all our food for the week, as well as some extra water and batteries. We don't usually loose our water if the power goes out because we have town water so it still works, but just in case we wanted to be safe. We always have a bit of a stock pile due to coupons and because we have such bad winters here, but I wanted a bit more.... I filled our car with gas and Nate did the same to the truck, and we got our generator almost ready to go, Nate has one more thing he has to do. We have never had a generator before but after the ice storm we got the first winter we lived here (2008) and going 14 hours with no power and only our woodstove for heat we decided we better get one. We have not even used it since we bought it so we didn't have the right outlet for it. Nate's got it all figured out and will get it all hooked up tomorrow before the storm comes on Sunday. I'm getting all our laundry done and hung outside today and I picked just about all our veggies from the garden.... I was worried if it gets too windy we would loose everything. I'm planning on putting all our potted flowers in the garage and I moved all our deck furniture to a safe spot and the cushions and umbrella inside... maybe all my hard work will be for nothing!!!!

We had plans to spend most of the day tomorrow, tomorrow night and Sunday at the lake and the Acton Fair.... but we decided we better go to the fair tonight and come back home just in case it really gets bad.

My thoughts and prayers and with all our friends in North and South Carolina as they are getting the storm much worse and most had to leave their homes.... hard to think that three years ago Sunday we moved here. If we had stayed in the Marine Corps we would be evacuating our home right now too...

We will be heading out to the fair tonight and preparing tomorrow.... and I guess we will see how many days it takes me to blog the after pictures. I'm hoping we wont be too long with out power and cable... but as long as our house fairs well I guess I can live with out those things....

Here are some pictures I took around our house today, I'm just interested to see what things look like on Monday.