I Need Counseling and a Big Giant EBT Card

I have a few more tips about hurricane preparation.

1. Never, ever trim your trees around power wires. Like I just did. I guess I don’t agree with this one. I mean, sure, okay, if you’re completely inept, don’t trim your trees. Don’t tweeze your own nose hairs. Sit in bed and wait for someone to put your shoes on for you. Because you are dangerous. But the rest of us have to take chances once in a while. I figured a 1% chance of instant death was well worth the near-certainty of being able to surf the web and look at lolcats after the storm.

I don’t know a whole lot about power lines, but I’m pretty sure 250 volts can’t blast through rubber insulation, run through a tree branch, and kill a guy wearing rubber-soled shoes.

It didn’t today.

2. Hire other people to do all the work. I kind of dropped the ball on this one. Now I have this strange, weak, droopy feeling all over my body, and a mysterious clear fluid is coming out of my skin. According to WebMD, it’s called “perspiration.” Nasty.

They wouldn’t have helped, anyway. I don’t speak Spanish. I would have been yelling at them to trim the tree, and they would have been trying to fix the toilet. Or using my computadora to register to vote in los American elections.

3. Forget your diet. If you have one. Eating during a hurricane scare is like eating junk food that says “natural” on the package. It doesn’t count.

4. Lunch meat, lunch meat, lunch meat. If you remember nothing else, remember this. When the power goes out, you will feel stupid with all those cans of cold soup. Lunch meat and a cooler will power you through the lean days. And you have a great excuse to use paper plates and plastic cups.

This is a great time to stock up on bagged chips. They last forever, they have tons of calories, and they’re chips. For the sake of comparison, salad will wilt in two days, it has the same amount of calories as fog, and worst of all, it’s salad.

I laid in two bags of Ruffles cheddar and sour cream flavor. Or is it “chedder ‘N’ sour cream”? Can’t recall.

I feel good about the day’s work. I have increased the likelihood of continued phone and power service from maybe 15% to 75%. Tomorrow I will have ample food. I am certain to have light, because in addition to the tree job, I found some yahrzeit candles at the store. These are depressing Jewish candles you’re supposed to light on the day someone died. It may be disrespectful to use them as emergency lighting, but they were really cheap, and they’re not perfumed, so they were just what I needed. Besides, I’m sure someone has died on October 5.

If the tree thing had gone poorly, those candles would have been really handy.

I decided to check. This is horrible. On October 5, 1763, August III, who as you all know was the king of Poland, died at 66. He was probably one of my three favorite Polish kings. Little-known fact: he invented the accordion. To scare cats out of the palace.

I may be slightly loopy right now, so bear with me. I got up at 4:30. And that’s not Warsaw time.

The weather is beautiful right now, if you consider the inside of a rice steamer illuminated by a MIG arc beautiful. It’s bright and painfully sunny, with very little wind. The humidity makes the air feel like molten rubber. It’s hard to believe the world is going to be over in a few hours. Usually, before a hurricane, you get creepy overcast days with breezes and intervals of rain as the cloud bands pass by.

I’m going to charge up the compressor in case I need to use the air hammer to get into those Ruffles in a hurry. Preparation is everything.

I’m pretty sure those chips are all-natural.

Depending on the quality of my tree trimming, you may hear from me tonight and tomorrow. If not, assume the worst. It will make the week more exciting.