Earthquakes, Hurricanes, What Else Do You Got?

My parking garage after the hurricane.

An unmoored boat, not mine for once, beached on the rocks by the Nyack pier.

First an earthquake, and now a hurricane.  Been an interesting August.

We rode out the hurricane okay.  I know we weren’t supposed to leave our home and all, but a friend was having a birthday party Saturday, and, well, the hurricane wasn’t expected to really arrive until later that night, so we went.  I mean, after writing a few weeks ago about how tough New Yorkers are, I couldn’t very well blow off a party for a little wind and rain.

I was certainly glad to be out of the city for something like this, though.  That was a little scary, some of the warnings that were being made. I’m thinking that in a natural disaster, you pretty much want to be in a place where you aren’t in a big tall building surrounded by other big tall buildings, and where you have a car that you can use to escape if the disaster turns into the apocalypse.

That said, I don’t have the classic suburban home. I’m up in a condo at the top of a tall building, poised to fall right into the Hudson should anything really bad happen.  Even better, pretty much all my walls are made of glass.  The glass is much better for checking out the river views, but much, much worse for your state of mind when they’re getting rocked by 75 mph winds.  You know what it sounds like when a hurricane hits a wall of glass, 200 feet above the ground?  I do.  Not good.  Not good at all.

But we made it through. No real damage, a little flooding in our garage but we were able to move the cars to higher ground.  The worst part was climbing stairs again, a reminder from my old days in my Manhattan walkup.  No way I was taking an elevator with the risk of the power going out (it eventually did for a day or so), making me one of those light-hearted news features about the schmuck who spent three days trapped drinking his own urine to survive.  So the stairs it is!

Hope everyone is okay.  Keep a watch out for the locusts.  And if you’re a first-born son like me, you might want to keep an eye on your front door.