Things I Google: Hurricane Florence

How’s my morning going you ask? Well, Hurricane Florence is quickly approaching and which each prediction the news gets worse and more comical for us. 

The title of this could also be some of the following:

• Things I Google: How to stay sane
• Things I Google: How to close on a house before a hurricane
• Things I Google: Should I close on a house before a hurricane
• Things I Google: Hurricane Preparedness
• Things I Google: How to pack when you don’t have boxes because your plan has been shot to hell
• Things I Google: Help.

Where do I start? I got this fun email first thing this morning and it’s honestly been down hill from there.

“Good morning, all. 

Our First Home

At this point the cat’s out of the bag. We’re buying a home! YAY! Except it’s going to end up in Oz when Hurricane Florence hits. 

via GIPHY

We wanted to keep it under wraps until it was official, but we are now in a state of slight panic. Our new home is closer to the water than our rental and it’s basically going to get directly hit. Another cute detail one meteorologist said was, “if your home isn’t made of brick or concrete it will likely be destroyed.” HA! AWESOME. This house is all wood. Perfect. I hope he’s wrong.

All I can picture is our beautiful home and perfect new roof  slowly getting destroyed by the wind and rain. Honestly, it’s all just comical at this point. We had smooth sailing with closing up until this point.

Hurricane Florence, you’re really boning us here and I’ll tell you why.

1. Closing was supposed to be on Thursday, Sept 13 at 1:30 pm and you’re projected to make landfall at 2 pm. I cannot close on a house with 30 minutes to spare before you destroy it. Also, there are like rules and stuff so, we are no longer closing. THANKS FLORENCE.
2. We need to be out of our current rental by the following Monday for inspections, carpet cleanings, and pest control. Oh, and new tenants are moving in on the 23rd. 
3. Next point of stress is that I had this beautiful (lazy) plan to wing this move and not really pack since we don’t have much stuff. I was just going to put stuff in my car, take it to close, and do the same thing on Friday before the big move on Saturday. Not only is that definitely not going to work, but I have no boxes, and at this point I don’t think people are going to want to help assist us move after our houses are potentially destroyed. I’ll be so endlessly thankful to anyone who does end up helping us move the heavy things because Lord knows I’ll definitely hurt myself. Thanks in advanced.
4. Lastly, if you’re truly a Category 4 like you’re projected to be, and you truly destroy houses, who knows how long it will be until we can actually close. So please be nice to us. 

So What Am I Doing Today?

Well, panicking of course. I’ve been frantically calling our rental company, our relator, and our insurance to make sure whatever ducks I have are in a row. I’ve been attempting to pack what I can, which is precisely nothing. And lastly, I’ve been trying to watch all these predictions and make an evacuation plan because this wing it wife obviously doesn’t have one. 

Like look at these predictions. They’re comical.

We’re basically the ‘M’ in NC…aka we’re doomed.

Whoever did this scribble has little to no hope for NC. We’ve been scribbled off the map!

This one is fun because where do we evacuate to? Flooding is real people!

Florence, NO ONE said you could bring friends to this party. Don’t be rude.

Our first thought for evacuation was to go to Richmond where my family is, but everyone and their mom will probably be going. Another important thing to remember is that I’m almost positive all of the roads that lead away from where we live will flood. They’re all two lane rural roads, which also means a huge gridlock situation once they issue a mandatory evacuation. 

What’s also fun is we haven’t gotten word from base as to what our status is and we naturally won’t get it until the grid lock is happening. Ugh this is gonna be soooooo fun!

I’m declaring myself in a state of emergency. 

How to Prepare for a Hurricane

Well according to the reliable Facebook news system we’re all supposed to go to the store and get water and bread. So what did my husband get?

A TON of water. 2 boxes of Cheese Its (that he’s been eating). 4 cans of soup. No bread. 

AKA we are obviously the most prepared people in NC. 

In all seriousness, we’ve both been through our fair share of hurricanes growing up in VA and while living in FL and TX. I think we’re both of the mindset that everything is fine, but internally we’re kind of panicking and trying to be adults. I just hope we didn’t bring bad hurricane juju with us when we weren’t destroyed by Irma, and only got the tail end of Harvey… someone send me some sage! QUICK!

For any hurricane virgins, I did some googling and found that Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has a great list of info for what to do for hurricanes/emergencies. Here’s a picture of some important things to do according to FEMA.

I probably need to send this to my husband… he needs some education and understanding of what “3 Day supply for evacuation, 2 week supply for home” means. 

Honestly, this is all just funny. Like I can only laugh at it all because something like this would happen to us. I mean come on, we had to move 4 days after our wedding, this stuff is in our cards. It’s just another example of how we just wing it and hope that everything is going to be ok, because at the end of the day I have my dogs, my husband, and our important documents and that’s all we need (aside from food, shelter, and water- you get it). 

DON’T ABANDON YOUR DOGS DURING WEATHER EMERGENCIES! 

Sorry, just had to say that for the people in the back. 

For now, I need to get back to figuring out my life. I will probably continue to update this post and my Instagram and Twitter. If you’re in the hurricane’s path I wish you well and hope that you stay safe. 

And if you have no idea what to do right now like myself, just wing it…and do some more hurricane preparedness research!

Good luck!

-D

UPDATE (Wed, Sept 12, 2018): Yesterday, I woke up my usual lazy self and I received a phone call. My husband, who had been calm and collected about this, was now telling me in serious tone, “I’m almost done here, we are leaving no later than noon. Get everything ready.”

No, “Hi sweetness hope you woke up nicely” or gushy s***, straight to the point. My problem with this is that at that moment I knew he was now panicking. Aka my panic level reached an all time high.

I ran around like a mad man, tornadoing my house, videoing and taking pictures of everything, furiously Googled what I needed to be doing etc. I definitely don’t think I didn’t anything correctly. 

As they update the forecast today they’re saying we’re gonna flood. I didn’t take that seriously and I’m so mad I didn’t grab certain things. Rookie mistake. I’ll make a post soon about legit Hurricane things I’m learning that you should do. This is gonna be a life event for sure. 

Also of important note is electric, water, and gas. No one told us to turn that stuff off so …… yea that could be another fun issue we experience. I just scrolled up to see if FEMA mentioned it on that sheet, but they didn’t. I’m telling myself if it’s truly a serious thing, the news and mandatory evacuations would be telling us to do it.

*pauses to check mandatory evacuation info*

Confirmed – no one mentioned how to leave your house, so oh well can’t stress about it now.

Here’s some of our positives since we’re trying not to be negative nellies.

While trying to move our grill in the house, there was a GIANT cockroach (VOM) an uncomfortable distance from my hand. I obviously abandoned ship and my husband was less than pleased with me. Here’s a fun picture of that 🙂 and the cockroach nor the grill ended up in the house. Victory. 

We also witnessed not one but TWO high speed chases down 95!! We had never seen one before, so seeing two within an hour of each other was a real treat.

The Murderino in me was freaking out and coming up with all the possible scenarios occurring. Like did the first guy switch cars and catch back up to us!? No. We learned the second one was a silver alert, but it added some fun to our trip. 

* For those wondering a “Murderino” is a person who listens to “My Favorite Murder” podcast. It’s hilarious and so interesting. Check it out. 

Anyway, I’m gonna close this update up. We’re safely in Jacksonville, FL., with our dogs and we’re happy to be able to see some close friends while here. As of now we could be here well into next week. Stay tuned and stay safe. Time for some stress relief yoga. 

Update (Thursday 9/13): The storm is beginning to hit and FEMA just said they’re most concerned about the river located a block behind our house. Thank you FEMA, I now have grey hair and extreme levels of stress. 

Trying to be optimistic here, but then the news began to show our home town more frequently and the flooding that’s already occurring. Let me remind you the storm hasn’t quite hit yet. AKA I’ve lost all hope and know our home will be under water. 

At this moment I would like to reiterate – DO NOT LEAVE SENTIMENTALS BEHIND. I’m so mad at myself. All the letters I wrote during OCS, his blues, our wedding stuff… everything is still in our house. 

If you pray, please send some towards our homes. Not only will we likely not have a rental home to go back to, but the home we were going to close on today is probably going to be severely damaged. 

I’m trying to find the humor in it all, but at this point it’s no longer funny and I’m nervous about all our neighbors who stayed behind. 

Time for us to turn off the news and try and enjoy this “vacation” before the potential difficult weeks ahead. On a positive note, Nancy, our hotel breakfast helper said we’re here favorite couple, so I’m adopting her. 

Update (Friday 9/14): Flo girl you need to stop. Get out of town no one wants you here. 

So far we’ve been getting updates from our neighbors through a FB pages. They are still doing ok but they’re reporting the storm is moving really slow with high winds. Still no flooding in the streets, so that’s a plus!

They’re saying a ton of roofs have lost a lot of shingles causing leaks. It sounds like a lot of wind damage. We still haven’t heard specifics on our house, but someone said they will check when it’s safe. 

We have also been able to connect with the sellers of the home we were going to close on yesterday and they’re going to give us updates when they hear from their neighbors.

Luckily the home we were buying was built in the 70s and has fought through plenty of rough storms and hurricanes. At least so we assume ha! It’s also up on a high hill so another plus!

We will continue to post updates as we know more, but for now we’re here until Sunday, unless the USMC changes that, which they likely will once damages are assessed… but we all know the Marine Corps.. when duty calls it calls. 

On a positive note, Jax is great and I was able to find a gown for the ball and it was on mega sale 😏 I’ll make a fun post on that whole ordeal when I can. Ya gotta find the positives right? Hope everyone continues to stay safe.