I went to camp this weekend

It's close up the camp for the winter time.

Packed up the dog and the essentials and headed north to get the perishables out before my "guy up north" closed the place up for me.

It wasn't a great weekend forecast - ok, it really looked yucky (I think the guy on CH13 out of Portland actually used that word) but if you wait too long you can end up with things like a frozen (read: broken) toilet if there is a quick freeze.

Also like to get the leaves off the back deck so they didn't just sit and rot the wood all winter.

They claimed the first nor'easter of the season was on the way bringing high winds and snow and rain and sleet and every other kind of crap weather with it so it was a good time to hunker down and wait it out.

It's quiet up there in the woods even during a storm - you hear the rain on the roof and sometimes the wind gets busy enough so you hear it through the log walls, but mostly it's quiet.  You can actually hear the birds flying overhead if you are lucky enough to be outside when they pass.

So everything turned on and the furnace started and a bowl of hot soup for lunch - settle down for the real purpose of the visit.

Doing nothing.

Not totally nothing - rake the leaves away from the deck,  take the dog out once in a while and walk down the hill to the road to move some of the branches driven over on the way in, use the shop vac to suck up the errant fly or dead ant that always seem to be there and settle back down to read.

Somehow if you are home it's not acceptable to just sit and read - your Yankee conscience tells you that "you should be doing something".   The voice of my mother in my ear.  At camp, once the essentials are covered, there is nothing to do so that voice is quieter than usual!

There's no real point to this post - just to touch base with the few of you who actually still read the sometimes drivel that I write.  It was a good weekend - I got a lot of nothing done and waded another few hundred pages through the Outlander series that I'm re-reading.  Joey had a great time napping on the couch and alternating pestering me with his "throw the ball, throw the ball, throw the BALL" mantra.

Yeah, the power did go out around 8 pm that last night but the bed was warm and things actually came back on around 1 am so I was not doomed to leave without even having coffee in the morning.

So camp is closed and a lot of nothing got done - win/win!

On a lighter note

First hard frost last night - actually it's still going on.  Happy to find that the porch was dry enough so it wasn't a skating rink!  Some mornings taking the dog out is more of a challenge than I'm up to in the first 15 minutes of awakeness!

The trees will now be finishing the color changes and, sadly, dropping most of their local leaves on my lawns.  If I'm lucky a wind will come up and blow them all into the woods - I'm still waiting for the year that happens.  :)

Took the leaf tour a couple weekends ago - I haven't seen color this beautiful in a lot of years.

In a change of direction I drove up through Crawford Notch - usually I go the other way for the sweeping views down the notch when you come over the top.  Got to see things in a different way (not always a bad thing).

I've stood at the top of Mt Willard at the head of the notch - it looked a lot higher from down here!

The sky was a blue not so often seen in New Hampshire - sometimes the humidity makes it all "muddy" and not so clear.  Today, not a smidge of anything but clear blue and puffy clouds.

Sweeps of breath taking color everywhere!

Even the side roads had something to offer.

And, as in life, sometimes the most wonderful sights are right under your nose -

These colors pop every year within 10 minutes of my house - and the sun makes them glow.

So the point/motto/whatever this time around is yes, you can travel around the state (or the world) looking for wonderful things to see and sometimes just turning around in your own yard will show you something breathtaking or perhaps just fun.

It's been said by those more eloquent than I but take those few seconds to look around and marvel - it rests your soul for sure.

How many does it take?

Just wondering this morning how many extreme weather events happening in places that "it never happened here before" does it take before we take preparing seriously

And:

Make sure we have enough water stored for our families for at least a week (believe me, when the government says "three days"?  I hear "at least a week")

Doesn't have to be fancy - just store it in leftover juice bottles if that's what you have!

Ways to cook that don't depend on electricity being available.  Again it doesn't have to be fancy, we just have to have it before the "event".

I saw an interview on the Weather Channel yesterday.  Woman out looking for water for her family - and that was the third day from Michael hitting the Florida Panhandle.  She was already out of food too.

Which brings me to my next suggestion (yeah, I know - it's really nagging, not just suggesting):  Have some non-perishable food that you can eat without cooking (in case you missed the part about a way to cook)

Yeah, it's not gourmet but it's food and it can, in a pinch, be eaten without cooking.

And, by the way, even if you can get out to the store, what do you think you are going to find?

Yeah..........pretty much nothing. 

Realize that most stores don't stock much - they depend on daily deliveries and in the aftermath of even a small disaster (which Michael the Storm is far from being) deliveries are often impossible for days if not weeks.

So, it's only common sense (see?  I'm giving you all the benefit of the doubt and assuming you have that valuable commodity) to plan ahead, keep extra food in the house and be able to ride out an extended period of time in relative comfort.

All this would also assume that you are able to stay in your house.  Evacuation is an entirely different subject but the most important part of it is this:

IF THE AUTHORITIES TELL YOU TO GET OUT, YOU SHOULD ALREADY BE GONE!

Don't wait, don't waffle, don't argue - LEAVE!

And on that cheery note, please get a plan in place and be ready for the next time we are visited by something "that never happens here"!