Friday night I returned home to find that someone had taken our recycling bin, which was too bad, because we had been counting on using it as a bucket to catch drips if we had to. Not sure whether our neighbors were doing us a kind turn by taking it in off the street (so that it wouldn't blow away) and intend to put it back out next Friday, or whether they were also eyeing it as a way to catch their own drips.
We went out to Thai Yum because we figured we would be spending the rest of the weekend locked in the house. There were a good number of people there, which I was glad to see. Not sure whether there's always that many people out on Friday nights, or whether everyone else had the same idea we did.
Friday night we went up to the unit above us. About a week ago I had met our new neighbor, and I thought he said that was the unit he had moved into. We brought him a gallon of water as a housewarming present. We knocked, but no one answered. We left the water there with a note explaining that his balcony has a tendency to overflow and leak into his living room, if no one else had warned him about that yet.
Saturday morning I tracked down whether officers training was still happening, and was somewhat surprised to learn that it still was. I mean, New York was a lot further from the storm than we were, but public transit was going to shut down at noon there. The organizers explained that since the storm wasn't supposed to get there until 11pm, training would go on. I drove up to Homewood, picked up Jitka, and drove back to training without incident. Valerie and Amanda were also there. To my amazement, training started on time, and the officers training portion ended on time. They were going to go on with judges training, but we left at 2. I drove Jitka back, once again without incident, but by then it had started to rain.
I picked up Morgan, and we moved the car to a nearby garage. (Our condo is up on a hill, but the parking lot is a local minimum, so we thought it best to move the car.) The rain was pretty steady as we walked back, but the wind hadn't reached us yet. While I was out, Morgan had filled the bathtub with water.
When we got back, Tony still hadn't taken in the water, so either he was out for the weekend or I was wrong about the unit. Either way, we were a little nervous about not being able to get into the unit in the event the drain on the balcony clogged, the balcony filled, and the water leaked over into the living room and then down through our ceiling (again). To assuage our fears, we went up to the roof and looked down on the balcony: fortunately, it wasn't clogged at that time, so we hoped that it wouldn't become clogged during the storm.
We still had power Saturday evening, so I went ahead and made Pomegranate Chicken with Walnuts, from Every Day with Rachael Ray.
In hindsight, I should have had a vegetable with it, too. (Cooking out of The Food Matters Cookbook has made me accustomed to having the vegetables taken care of in the entree.) Not a keeper. We paired it with Spier Discover Pinotage / Shiraz 2009 (South Africa), which had been on the staff recommendations shelf at Corridor Fine Wine. Light and smoky: I liked it.
Through the night Saturday night you could hear sort of a low-level buzzing and the occasional howl of the wind, but the hurricane passed by without much incident.
By Sunday morning, the rain had stopped, and we never lost power, and the balcony didn't even leak. We went out for a (possibly ill-advised) walk: it was still pretty windy. There were a few downed branches and one downed streetlight in our neighborhood, but everyone else seemed to have their power, too. We stopped at Whole Foods for coffee and then at Lenny's for lunch. We moved the car back without incident.
Sunday afternoon I went to the grocery store (it was slightly less crowded than usual for a Sunday, because I guess everyone had gone Friday), and made Provençal Vegetables and Chicken in Packages from The Food Matters Cookbook for supper.
A good general technique (my dad used to make potato and corn packages with butter), but this particular mix of flavors was nothing special. (It once again confirmed my conclusion that the only way to cook eggplant is with lots and lots of oil: the parts of the eggplant that had oil drizzled on them were delicious and tasted like eggplant, but the parts that were just steamed were a bit stiff and flavorless.)
In conclusion, my first hurricane was a bit anticlimactic, not unlike my first earthquake. (Really, that was it?)
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