Hildegarde

Well, no.

What it is is a very soggy morning even before the rain comes, with a little wind. 

But Sandy hasn’t made landfall yet, so although I’ve got my fingers crossed, I’m also charging everything chargable in the house. 

All the schools are closed, and most of them  have declared themselves closed both today and tomorrow.  Up where I am, this is a little difficult to understand. 

The storm is not supposed to hit Connecticut until late this afternoon or early this evening.

It makes sense to me that most of the towns on the shore issued mandatory evacuations for about midnight last night.  If we get the worst case scenario, there’s going to be coastal flooding across four high tide cycles, and having an entire twenty four hours to make sure the town is cleared out is probably the prudent thing.

Up here, though, the major damage is supposed to be from wind–which can be really bad, admittedly–and the wind hasn’t started yet.

If I was the one in charge of cancelling things up here, I would have gone for Tuesday and Wednesday rather than Monday and Tuesday. 

But Governor Malloy has declared a state of emergency in advance of the storm, and he keeps holding press conferences along with the new President of Connecticut Light and Power, the people who didn’t respond all that well to the last mess we were in.

The guy who was President then was forced out after last year’s storm.  They had to put armed guards on his house just in case somebody got it into his head to kill him.  In the end, the armed guards weren’t necessary, and the man slunk out of town under his own steam.

The new guy looks absolutely petrified, and I don’t blame him.  Every time he said exactly the same kind of thing the last guy said last year–“we can’t prevent widespread outages,” “when it’s safe we’ll start assessing the damage”–Malloy looked daggers at  him.

In the end, I suppose the only real answer is to put all the wires underground.  I think the reason that we haven’t done that is that it’s too expensive both to install and to maintain. 

That argument assumes, of course, that storms like this, with power outages like last year, will be few and far between.  But this is the third one we’ve had in eighteen months, so I’m not sure if that rationale remains convincing.

My feeling about that kind of thing is that I rather like storms as long as we don’t lose power. 

Being without power for eight days last year was miserable beyond belief, but some of the happiest times I’ve had in this house have involved full power without outages, fully stocked larder and freezers, and a two foot fall.

When I was  younger, I used to prefer fall afternoons, with that weird half-light you get as you’re going to dark, to any other kind of weather or season. 

When I imagined myself grown up and out in the world, it was always walking through weather like that. 

That’s where the fantasy of the purple cashmere sweater and the tweed skirt came in.

These days I tend to prefer spring. 

The question now, of course, becomes what to read. 

I finished a book last night–What Matters in Jane Austen, by John Mullan–and haven’t really gotten started on another one.

That can always be a difficult problem, but at the moment there are considerations other than the usual.

For one thing, I’ve had to reject a Perry Miller intellectual history because the type is so small, I won’t be able to see it without artificial light.

A friend of mine recently gave me my first e-reader, which is now filled with absolutely wonderful stuff you can get for free–I don’t know who thought that up, but bless him.  Or her.  Or it, if it was a bot–but e-readers have batteries that need to be charged.

Granted, those batteries seem to have really long lives, but still. 

I’m looking for something I can read in the daytime if the electricity goes out, and that won’t run out of batteries when I can’t get the batteries recharged.

I am definitely one of those people who wants better safe when I’ve got a situation.

Whatever.

The wind is picking up, so I think I’m going to publish this and go back to watching the weather news obsessively.

The current projections have this thing hitting the coast at just around Atlantic City, which ought to provide fodder for a few sermons in New Jersey come Sunday morning.