We Prepare For a Storm

I premise this post by confessing that I would be helpless without my wife. Meredith is good at so many things necessary to navigate this complex and confusing world. I am not. Without her my finances would be a mess, our vehicles would need maintenance, there would be no food in the pantry, the pets would go hungry, the house would be in disrepair and I would be living in unhealthy squalor. My ineptitude is so bad that I have asked her to prepare a list of the essential information I need to know if she was ever incapacitated in an accident. Stuff like where do we bank, where are the extra car keys, how does the dishwasher work, do we own a waffle griddle and where do we store the toilet paper? I would never trade her in on a new model. She knows too much.

Not only is she amazingly competent and organized, but even after so many years of marriage I find she has very few irritating habits. Not that I’m complaining. I am fully aware that I have very few ingratiating habits. In fact, I am one big irritating habit which means that she is the long-suffering partner in this relationship, not me. In my defense, I do get up in the morning and start a fire in the wood stove so the cabin is toasty when she gets out of bed. In my mind, that alone justifies my existence.

Permit me a sideways meander. The odds are that in retirement you and your spouse are going to be around each other a hell of lot more than when one or both of you worked. That introduces a new dynamic into the equation. It is highly likely, no matter how perfect the marriage, that the two of you are going to get on each other’s nerves very quickly. You need to give serious thought to this potential problem before you retire and come up with strategies to prevent yourselves from killing each other. The simplest strategy is to stay away from each other as much as possible. Give each other some space. I call it spouse space. Try to say that three times.

As I said, Meredith has very few habits that irritate me, and those that she has are very minor. One of them is that she absent-mindedly hums to herself as she goes about ensuring my existence. It’s just a low tuneless humming under her breath. It’s not like she’s Ethel Merman going around belting out God Bless America at the top of her lungs. You may think that’s not a big deal, but when you’re trapped inside for four days because of an ice storm and the outside temperature is ten degrees, having the humming nun in the house can get under your skin after a while. Hell, being trapped with the Sports Illustrated swimsuit models for four days would get irritating if they hummed the entire time. Fortunately, I can give myself spouse space by retreating to another room and write this blog or practice my bass. Not a big deal.

Another potential irritant arises from the fact that she is a weather junkie. She pays more attention to the weather forecasts than a nervous ship captain. Before she got her iPhone she watched The Weather Channel and local weather news as avidly as horny old men watch Spanish language cable shows like Sabado Gigante to see voluptuous women in low-cut dresses. When she got her iPhone, her fixation got worse. Now the information is at her fingertips 24 hours a day, and I get hourly weather updates without asking. If I ask her what the weather will be, I get a full extended meteorological forecast complete with words like vortex, jet stream and pressure gradient. Sometimes it’s a bit much for me. I’m looking for the simple forecast: cold, wet, hot, or dry.

But the thing she dearly loves the most is the active radar display on her smart phone. When a storm is approaching I can generally count on getting minute-by-minute countdowns of when the rain or snow will hit our house. Little does she realize that this only makes the approaching weather sound more ominous than it really is. By the time the countdown is under ten minutes, I’m so worked up and anxious I feel like a species-ending meteorite, Armageddon or the Rapture is bearing down on me. If the rain or snow does not arrive precisely on schedule, which is usually the case, she’s visibly disappointed. If it doesn’t arrive at all, we’re looking at outright depression.

With that background, imagine what our household went through when the weatherman predicted a winter snow and ice storm would hit our neck of the woods. We immediately went to DefCon Two. When the governor called a weather emergency for North Georgia, we went to DefCon Three. But the kicker was when Meredith’s smart phone emitted several loud warning buzzes and informed us in that emotionless mechanical voice that scares the crap out of you anyway that the local Emergency Operations Center had just issued a weather advisory. It was DefCon Five at the Yacavone household.

The prediction was for a bad ice and snow storm. We have been told by a number of people that an ice storm is among the worst weather events that can happen around here. Longtime residents say that the power can go out for hours and maybe days and that the roads are impassable. Almost all newcomers to Fannin County have been regaled with tales of the ’09 (or whatever the date was) storm that hit the area. People were shut in for days without electricity and had to survive on graham crackers and wheat thins. It was worse than the Donner Pass party. People ate their young to survive. Yetis came down from the hills and snatched people from their houses. The Grinch was seen. Maybe I’m exaggerating; the stories seem to grow as time passes.

The storm was supposed to hit us at 6:00 PM the next day. I started going down my mental check list of emergency preparedness:

Flashlights. Check.

Batteries. Check.

Emergency generator. Check.

Food supplies. Check.

Duct tape. Check. Just in case I’m trapped inside for days and the humming gets to be too much.

Gasoline, diesel, and kerosene. Check, check, and check. One of these days I’m going to build my diesel fuel stock up to a couple of hundred gallons. You never know when you may have to escape to Montana on your tractor.

Handguns, rifles, shotguns and ample ammunition for the same. Check, check, check, and check. Just in case there is civil unrest, wolves or a yeti or two.

Axes, hatchets, machetes and large knives. Check, check, check and check. I could probably outfit a decent sized Viking raiding party, but I made a note to myself to see if I can pick up a couple of swords.

Alcohol. Check. I’ve never read a survival manual that lists booze as an essential emergency supply, but I include it on the belief that if it is the end of the world, I want to be able to sit back in a comfortable chair with a nice drink and enjoy the spectacle while it lasts.

Satisfied that we were prepared for the next great ice age, I sat back and awaited its arrival. The countdown started at T-minus three hours and counting. I'm sure you can guess where this is going. At 6:00 PM the entire family—Meredith, Mike, me, the dog and the cat—were staring out the kitchen window towards the northeast at … nothing. No snow, no ice, no sleet, nothing. After a few minutes the dog went to lay by the woodstove, the cat curled up on the couch, Mike got bored and disappeared and Meredith wandered off tapping her iPhone and muttering, “I don’t understand it, I don’t understand it.” As for me, I took the high road, bit my tongue and made no comment.

Thankfully, order was restored to Meredith’s universe later that evening when we had some snow flurries and the temperature plummeted to teens. While the storm was not as bad as predicted, there was enough ice and cold to keep us homebound for a few days.

Now, if I could only get this bothersome humming out of my ears.