Batten down the hatches

With hurricane Sandy bearing down on the Eastern seaboard, we've holed up at home here in Somerville. Everybody at my work has been told to work from home today, and D's meetings have been shifted to Skype. Our camping lantern and flashlights are lined up in case we lose power, and we've got plenty of water and food.

 We're quite far from the epicenter since Sandy swung left last night and is making landfall in New Jersey this afternoon. So we're seeing the outer arms of the storm, it looks like sustained winds in the 30 mph range and some heavy rain are what we're in for. So some trees will probably fall, but aside from that we're not really under any threat here.  The storm is expected to basically pivot around us so we'll probably get rain for several days.

On Sunday I went out to do our normal weekend grocery run and it seems people are taking the storm quite seriously - there were long lines but the stores knew it was coming and were fully staffed.  I went in the morning hoping to avoid the rush, but then learned that the New England Patriots were playing just after noon.  This is a sports mad state, so it was mixed crowd out shopping: pre-storm buying batteries and cans, pre-game buying beer and chips.