Natural Disaster Week!

Between the earthquake and the hurricane, I'd say the East Coast has faced it's share of disasters last week, eh? A damn good thing we're not expecting Brood X for another 10 years.

On Tuesday afternoon, I heard a rumbling and looked up at my office ceiling only to find it undulating like Jell-O. My first thought was that the building's maintenance crew was doing wind sprints in the penthouse, but half a second later, my brain said "It's an earthquake, stupid! Get out!" I grabbed my purse just as our Fire Marshal was telling us to evacuate the building. We spent an hour outside, most of us attempting to contact family via cellphone. I was only able to text, and after several frustrating minutes, was able to contact my loved ones to make sure all was well.

A few days later, we braced ourselves for Hurricane Irene, which terrorized the coast from the Carolinas to Maine. We were pretty confident that we'd escape relatively unscathed, but packed away a day's worth of food in a cooler just in case. As it turned out, rain and wind did little damage in our immediate area (just north of the City line), but we lost power anyway because our block happens to be on the crappy City grid. Two days later, when power returned, I was a bit annoyed that we'd have to throw out everything in the freezer. Meanwhile, our neighbors across the street had power the entire weekend.

In both cases, however, we escaped unscathed.

But the event that affected me most in the past week was not the work of Mother Nature, but the suicide of former Orioles pitcher Mike Flanagan. I became a rabid baseball fan after the 1979 World Series, and Flanny was one of my all-time favorite players. Having recently seen him acting as color commentator on MASN, I found his death more than a bit shocking.

My heart goes out to his family; their personal disaster will have lifelong repercussions that make a couple of natural ones pale by comparison.

Posted by theminx on Minxeats.com.