Irene

Yesterday was an interesting day because of the hurricane, and as you can tell, we made it through OK, because here I am typing out this post :)

It actually wasn't too bad here all things considered. For one, it really didn't rain much at all. There were some spurts with heavy rain, and a lot of light showers, but the brook didn't flood and the marsh didn't flood, and the little hill that my house sits on didn't become an island, so that was good. It WAS really windy though! I was glad that we had moved all of the porch furniture and the badminton net and stuff because if they had been out there....they would be gone. It was actually pretty cool and a bit scary to see the trees across the street wave and bend, and our weeping willow became much more like a whipping willow if you ask me. Also a lot of people around us lost power but ours just flickered several times but didn't go out for more than 30 seconds. I guess we were lucky!

My mom and I were able to make it up to church in the morning which was nice, although there were NOT a lot of people there at all! No more than thirty, and that's streching it. Our church was actually one of the only ones that stayed open too.

I got another good chunk of homework done, just a little bit left for today and tomorrow...

And my friend Lucy decided to have a hurricane party with me and our friends Anna and Mackenzie. We ate a lot of junk food, especially brownies and doritos, and because we're marching band geeks we watched National Treasure. It was really entertaining even though I've seen it a couple times before because Lucy was talking the whole time, Anna was like "Shut up Lucy I've never seen this movie before and I wanna watch it" and Mackenzie and I payed close attention to the music and shouted things like 'OOOH!!!! That's like measure twenty-five in our opener!!!' Oh what marching band geeks we are...

Anyway, it was a pretty fun day all in all, and it is beautiful out today which means we'll be able to have rehearsal outdoors as planned- which is good.

How did those of you also in Irene's path fare?

Whirlwind

It certainly has seemed like a whirlwind this past week- hence my not posting which I apologize about. Must get better about that. Sorry. Anyway, there have been three big things happening this week.

The first is, of course, marching band. Naturally, I'm totally loving every second of it....well...not the seconds when my water bottle exploded but pretty much every other second. We have worked hard for several hours every day this past Monday-Friday usually around 4 to 9 in the evening. It's been a lot of fun to get back with the family (and oh what a crazy family we are) doing slides and flip-flops and jazz runs in advanced technique block, frantically memorizing music, marking and re-marking sets with chalk and soap, marching and playing and getting yelled at and singing and marching and getting yelled at again. It's been good. Really really good.

The second thing has been nowhere near as much fun. Summer homework. I've been working like crazy reading biographies, textbook chapters, articles, and novels, answering questions, doing reading logs and taking an AP practice exam. Thankfully, I am nearly done and should finish tomorrow or Monday. I have made great progress the past couple of days, for example I just sat down today and wrote a two and a half page essay on why John Brown was an influential person in American history.

Not cool.

Very very boring.

And finally, the hurricane. In a few hours Irene will strike my area, and who knows what's gonna happen then. As one of my friends posted on facebook today, 'I live in Maine! I should be worrying about moose attacks and blizzards, not hurricanes!'. Hurricanes are kind of odd for us out here, I mean we were supposed to be hit by Earl and Kyle last year but they both went out to sea, but Irene isn't going to do that. She's going to be tearing into here tonight, so tomorrow and Monday should be interesting. For those of you also on the East Coast where the hurricane has already hit or will hit, good luck and my prayers are with you! I will try and give you an update of how I am doing through the storm tomorrow, but if the power is out I'll have to wait on that :)

Meeting Earl

They say that Earl could be here any time between now and 4:30. In fact, looking out my bedroom window, I can see that he'll be here sooner rather then later. But Earl isn't a family friend, or someone I'm meeting for the first time. Earl is...a hurricane. And soon enough, we'll meet. Right now, this is what Earl is tracking as:

Still a hurricane when he hits us, not a tropical storm. 80mph winds. 80mph. That's windy!

It was all the talk at school yesterday. "Earl's coming." "Hurricane coming tomorrow!" "We won't have to evacuate, will we?"

But then again, we've known we might be hit for a while now.

We've known it's a fairly big storm, with a clear eye, or center. And if you don't know what a clear eye means, just check out this quote.

Sure, we are talking about Hurricane Andrew here in this quote, not Earl, and Earl is really no comparison to Andrew. But the eye is clear. It is still a serious storm.

But this is all in the past week. THIS is today.

"Hurricane Earl skirted North Carolina’s Outer Banks, with the eye of the storm staying 50 miles offshore. However, the Outer Banks were still hit hard by flooding and hurricane force winds.  Some local highways were closed, scattered power outages reported, and at least 400 people spent the night in shelters.

Now, Earl is moving towards New England.  Millions more people could be affected by this storm."

The hurricane is coming, that's for sure. The wind has been picking up just as I type this. We can expect Earl, very, very soon.