It has certainly been the week. Who needs coffee in the morning when it’s hurricane season?
Speaking of coffee and other vital household goods, apparently not everyone was prepared in advance, judging by the supermarket parking lots from Monday morning. I include myself in that group. We had a decent collection of canned comestibles in the house, but I still found we were lacking in some areas. More on that in a moment.
It seems we prepare for hurricane season like we do for Christmas. Some people have all their shopping done early and everything is organised, so when the date arrives, they are sitting at home with their feet up, while others are scouring the store shelves at the eleventh hour, urgently trying to find that elusive item.
Suffice it to say that between COVID and storm-supply over-buying, we all need to start lowering our toilet paper expectations from Charmin to packing cardboard. Supermarket aisles dedicated to the cleanliness of human nether regions stood woefully empty at the beginning of the week, as evidenced by photos littering social media.
Now is the time to begin training what I’ll call the Voldemort part of the body (it shall not be named) to become hardy in the face of adversity. Start with toilet paper, then move to kitchen towel, followed by gift wrapping, wax paper and, finally, cardboard. By the time the next crisis comes around, desperate folk will be offering black-market money for the last pack of two-ply while you’re sitting high on the hog, surrounded by grainy brown sheets of card.
And to think I thought I wouldn’t have a subject to write about this week…
Anyhoo, as I mentioned earlier, I too am not as prepared as I should be when a storm is approaching. We already had bottled water and cans of SpaghettiOs – all a growing girl needs – so no worries there, but we needed petrol for the generator and a bonkers number of batteries to operate some battery-powered fans we’d bought years ago.
I ventured out on the road early on Monday, and passed Kirk Market, which looked like it was hosting a tailgate party at 9am. On I drove to A. L. Thompson’s to get my supplies. I needed petrol containers, so I walked back to The Outdoors section. It was only when I bumped into AL T himself that I realised I was embarrassed to be there, looking for such things at the last minute. The moment I asked for the location of those canisters, it would be obvious why I needed them, and what was I, a (supposedly) intelligent lady, doing, panic-buying when Hurricane Delta was nearly on our back doorstep?
It reminded me of when I’d approach the supermarket cash register with nothing but a collection of ice cream, chips, bricks of cheese and chocolate, blathering to the cashier who had never asked for the information in the first place that it was all for a party or some other lie.
In his defence, AL T did not look at me askance or in a judgmental fashion – he smiled and simply pointed me in the direction of a shiny row of containers and left me to my paranoia.
With two five-gallon drums in hand, it was battery time. I felt less guilty about pushing around a few sets of eight ‘D’ batteries in one of the store’s mammoth carts. If you have to ask why, it’s ‘cos you’ve never had to carry them. No wonder a couple of those in the bottom of a sock is a weapon of choice in prison. Get brained by that, spinning at speed, and it’s ‘Goodnight, Irene’.
When I finally got home, I was pretty tired, but there was no rest to be had – I now I had to move all the patio furniture inside. Nothing’ll put you off buying more stuff than when you have to relocate a whole bunch of it.
The wild chickens (clearly without toilet paper or cardboard at their disposal) had had a field day all over the outdoor chairs. By the time the last wicker table and ottoman had been moved, I was a filthy, smelly mess. I was also hungry, but didn’t dare open a can of precious SpaghettiOs, so I went for low-sodium soup instead… which needed a cup of salt to make it palatable.
After a good shower, I was feeling more myself, yet still pretty drained. It had been a very long day with that constant underlying worry about the approaching storm.
Of course, we know the rest of the story. We mercifully dodged an extremely powerful bullet and we can breathe easy for a while.
Now I gotta figure out what to do with all this cardboard.
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