Hurricane Hermine
Entry posted by cadberry ·
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Let me begin by saying that we are well, we had no damage to our home, and our power and water are restored. However, half of our city is still without power (since Thursday night) and it may still be a few more days. We are blessed beyond measure to be where we are at this point.
Next let me say that we are so thankful that we saved back some of DH's leave payout from his retirement because that has relieved some of the anxiety related to storm preparation and post-storm "survival". I had filled my car with gas, gotten our cash for the pay period, and we had postponed a trip to Sam's Club which would have filled our refrigerator for the month. Instead, when the storm hit and our power went out (36+ hours), I wasn't concerned about the contents of the frig because it wasn't much and we had our grocery money still intact. It was probably time to take everything out and do a deep scrub of the inside of the frig and freezer anyway. We have a deep freezer (chest style) in the garage but since DS moved to college, we won't be needing it (it's where we kept supplies of frozen pizza, waffles, etc., which we won't be buying as he was the only one who really ate them). In fact, we decided that we'll just shut it down for now and make do with our refrigerator's freezer, so that should save some electricity each month.
Speaking of electricity, 36 hours of no air conditioning (or other power usage) should help our bill be a little bit lower. Our neighborhood is also on a well which means when the electricity is out, so it the water, so maybe our water bill will be down a little bit, too.
However, our expenses for this will not be down as we made an early evening decision to leave town when we knew our electricity wasn't coming back before nightfall. Our DS at home has some health considerations that the heat and humidity and such were going to complicate, so we found a place a few hours north and spent two nights with air conditioning and running water! This is why I am thankful that we had the extra cash saved back from DH's leave payout, so we could do that. If it wasn't for DS, I would have just stuck it out another day to see what happened, but sometimes you just can't "wait and see." We packed as much food as we could take with us so we only had to spend money for the room, gas, and a wee bit of food. And while we were away, we visited a state park and tried to "salvage" the long weekend. We kept in touch with neighbors so we knew when the power was restored to our neighborhood and while we had made reservations through Monday (in case the power took longer to restore), as soon as we were notified, we made arrangements with the hotel to check out a day earlier.
One of our grocery store chains runs a promotion occasionally where if you spend a certain amount on groceries, you can get a gas card for 20% off. We had done that in August and had $25 on the gift card. Plus I finally got around to joining the fuel rewards program, so we were able to use only the gas gift card for the fuel we needed.
I'm still getting accustomed to how hotels process debit cards, so I'm glad we had the extra from DH's payout to "buffer" the "hold" they place on the debit card.
Anyway, I'm glad we're getting settled again. The frig is clean and I went to the store for essentials. And only essentials.
I hope if any of you reading this experienced Hermine that you came out without any damage or loss.
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