So it's Sunday night and I'm typing this by the light of my laptop screen and one very optimistic candle from the junk drawer, because apparently we're all supposed to be "storm ready" by the time this posts. Sandy's still a day out but the whole East Coast has basically already shut itself down in advance. The MTA said they're pulling buses and subways around 7 tonight, which if you don't live here, is genuinely bizarre to hear, the subway just doesn't stop, that's the whole point of it, and now it is. There's already talk that the stock exchange won't open tomorrow either. I can't remember the last time that happened for weather and not, like, a national tragedy.
I did the responsible thing today and backed up my laptop to the external drive that's been sitting unplugged next to my desk since basically forever, and also dumped my in-progress stuff into Dropbox, which feels like a very 2012 sentence to type but here we are. If the power goes out for a few days I don't want to be the guy who lost three months of freelance work because he was too lazy to drag a cable six inches across a desk. I also charged every battery-powered thing I own, including a phone I don't even use anymore, on the theory that more charged batteries is never bad.
Here's my actual complaint of the night though: I went to the grocery store around four this afternoon and it was an absolute zoo. Not because people were buying sensible things like water and canned soup, that I get, but because half the store seemed to be there for milk and bread specifically, like there's some ancestral memory that says a storm means french toast. The bread aisle was picked clean down to the weird seeded stuff nobody wants. I ended up with a loaf of rye and a can of chili and called it good. There were also two separate people arguing, out loud, about the last flashlight on the shelf, which is the kind of thing that makes you remember everyone is just a little bit feral underneath the errands.
Small, dumb, and very of-the-moment: I preordered the iPad Mini on Friday when Apple opened it up, the 16 gig WiFi one, $329, figuring I'd have it in hand by the second or so of November like they said. Now I'm sitting here wondering if a storm that's about to clobber half the shipping infrastructure on the Eastern seaboard is going to push that back. It's such a minor thing to be thinking about with an actual hurricane bearing down, and I know that, but that's genuinely where my brain goes at 9pm on a Sunday, half worried about flooding, half worried about a cardboard box sitting in a UPS depot somewhere in New Jersey. I'm not even sure I need the thing. I have an iPad already, the third-gen one, and the honest reason I bought the Mini is that the size annoyed me every single time I tried to read in bed with it. That's it. That's the whole justification. Three hundred and thirty dollars because a tablet felt too big holding it one-handed at midnight.
Windows 8 also went out into the world this week and I haven't touched it yet, which feels like it should bother me more than it does. Everyone I know who's tried it has some variation of "it's fine once you get used to it," said in the tone people use when they mean it is not fine yet. I'll get to it eventually, probably once I'm bored enough during the storm to actually sit and mess with a fresh install on the old desktop instead of doing something productive.
Anyway. If this is the last post for a few days it's because the power went out and not because anything more dramatic happened, I'm inland enough that I'm mostly just going to get wind and rain and a very long Monday. Stay off the roads if you're near the coast tomorrow, charge your stuff now if you haven't, and if you're one of the people who bought the last twelve loaves of bread today, I hope you're happy.