weathering the storm

My friends Susan and Ben are California natives who now live in Wilmington, North Carolina. Thankfully, they survived their first real hurricane with no real damage to their home.

Here's a bit from Susan's note about what they did yesterday during Hurricane Ophelia. I love that she was a busy bee, cleaning and baking while a hurricane howled outside.

The most inconvenient thing has been having to take Emily and our new puppy out to pee. Emily refuses to go in the screened in porch and the puppy, Daisy, we just got on Saturday, is totally confused about where to go. So much for housebreaking. We lost power for about five hours this morning, but we have had power ever since. It was nice to have the day off, but I must say I got a little stir crazy. I cleaned all the bathrooms, vacuumed, changed sheets, installed new software on my computer, made meatloaf and cookies. Then this evening, we got on all our rain gear and went next door for dinner (with my meatloaf).
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Well, we're still here along with the house and all of it's shingles, which is pretty amazing given we lost shingles from the roof during every spring thunderstorm. Guess Ben is a better handyman than we thought.

I read some of the national coverage online, and I noticed that they mention Wrightsville Beach and Carolina Beach quite a bit. Those are our local beaches. You might hear of Southport and Bald Head Island in the news, too. Those places are at the mouth of the Cape Fear River here in Wilmington. From the way the media is making it sound, it looks like Ben and I were pretty lucky (and Ben's parents probably didn't sleep all night worrying about us).