Come on Irene....

If you're looking for an example of proper hurricane preparedness, you'll have to look elsewhere.

After watching the new for the past couple days, we made no plans for the weekend and planned to camp out. I think our area is under thunderstorm or tropical storm watch. We are out of the direct path of the hurricane. Apparently this hurricane is the size of Europe, so I am still a bit cautious as to what the weekend will bring. 

We hit the grocery store after work tonight just like every other person in town. It was amazing to see the items that are COMPLETELY wiped out. Bananas? Gone. Bottled water? Gone. Milk? Got the last jug. It really was crazy to see the lines and the panic about the impending storm. People had check lists a mile long. I just wanted to make sure we won't get bored or hungry.

We are west of I95, everyone east of us is in trouble, but I think we should be OK. We bought diet coke, some booze, eggs, and milk, along with some other essentials to make some fun new recipes. I started panicking that we were the only cart in the store without bottled water, so we threw one of the last on the emergency pallet at the front of the store.

We are completely fine food wise if we are stranded in the house for about 10-12 days (but how would that happen?). If we lose electricity? We're screwed. I have ice ready to go and a cooler to put some stuff in, but basically all the food we have requires electricity to cook. Pasta, frozen meats, microwave popcorn, all useless without electricity. At least we'll have cold beer and wine.

Once we got home, I started looking around to see if we'd be ok without power. Candles are ready to go. Flashlight out and ready. Back up batteries were purchased. Let's hope we don't need to use any of these.

As long as the lights stay on, we'll be good to go. We have movies from the list queued up on the DVR and ready to be watched with some delicious popcorn. Wii games we haven't played in a while and new recipes for days to try out. If the lights go out, I'll be reading my fully charged Kindle until it dies or cleaning out the stacks of magazines sitting in our house. I finally bought a binder to organize all of the tear sheets that have been collecting from each month's subscriptions.

If you're on the East Coast, are you ready? Do you have better prep plans than we scrapped together? If you're not in the path of the hurricane, do you have better weekend plans?