Prelude To A Hurricane


Sunday, October 28, 2012

If I'm to start from the beginning, then I guess my experience with Hurricane/Superstorm/Villain/Terrorist Sandy goes back to Sunday.  Saturday and the lead up to the weekend had been all fun and games in New York.  By Thursday night I began seeing costumed denizens of the city roaming around the street, celebrating Halloween as New Yorkers do: four or five nights of revelry, dancing, and bar hopping lead up to a grand evening parade through Greenwich Village.  It's basically a longer version of every weekend in New York, but with more participants and more costumes.

I celebrated myself on Saturday night (as seen above in my monk costume,) which turned out to be the climax of the holiday this year.  Landing on a Wednesday, people were sure to stretch this one across two weekends, that is, from the Thursday of the first weekend to at least the Sunday if not the Monday of the latter, right up to election day.  I had invitations to three Halloween parties, but they all appeared on the first Saturday, with another masquerade-themed birthday party landing on the subsequent weekend.  After a long shift working at the wine store on Saturday, I was out till close to 4AM, attending two of the three parties, which were both quite entertaining without being as rambunctious as they've been in past years.

A few hours later, I was up and back to the wine shop, settling in for what I thought would be a long slow shift.  After a relatively quiet day for business Saturday, and given the impending storm, I figured people were starting to hunker in for the long-haul.  Quite the opposite, Sunday in New York is when the collective masses raided every store of consequence, gathering all necessary—and less-than necessary—items.  We had customers rolling in all day from the moment we opened the shop at noon until our early close at 5:50.  MTA was set to shut down indefinitely at 7PM, and both of my colleagues needed to get back to Brooklyn, so we were efficient in getting out the door by 6.

After work, I walked over to Trader Joe's to stock up on a few extra food items before the storm.  Not surprisingly, their employees had to get home too, and the sign posted outside said they'd closed at 5.  Next, I tried to stop by a D'Agostino's, but they were extremely busy and already out of a lot of items, so I decided to head all the way back to my apartment and fill up at my local supermarket with a bigger bag then I had on me.  The Morton Williams I went to was as busy as ever, but the store was bigger, so it was more manageable simply walking through the aisles.  I was able to get most of what I was looking for and thought of a few more things while I was there, but bread was entirely sold out.  I made up for it with two packs of tortillas, which I would use in some burritos I'd already planned to make.

Inspired by my friend Peter, who'd told me two nights prior that he was watching horror movies all week leading up to Halloween, I found Scream 2 on Netflix, and settled in for what I figured would be a lazy two days at home. Oh, how naive I was...

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