Personal Note: So. Hurricane.

First an earthquake; now this. It's enough to make one question the fallaciousness of the Gambler's Fallacy.

My immediate neck of the woods escaped serious damage -- I think most of the marginal trees and tree limbs came down in last year's windstorm (though my friend C lost power when a 100-year-old tree toppled onto electrical lines in his neighborhood) and, being on high ground, we didn't have the trouble with flooding that lower-lying areas did. My perceptions of the event are seriously skewed, however, by the fact that, during the height of the storm, the local fire siren sounded just as the TV began bannering a tornado warning for my county under the Patriots-Lions game. Twenty seconds later I was in the basement with my little weather radio trying to get more information and figure out how best not to die in the absence of anything sturdy to crawl beneath. As it happened, the siren had nothing to do with the warning (mixed reactions of phew! and why, in the age of the cell phone and the pager, does the company have to run its [redacted] siren every time they get a call?) and the tornado passed well to the south. But when the next warning indicated possible tornadoes a hop-skip-jump to the north, I realized I wasn't getting any sleep until the watch was lifted at 5:00 am. So I made myself a bed in the hallway next to the bathroom, on the assumption that a) if I had no warning of impending doom I was at least in the hallway away from the windows; b) if I had very little warning I could dive into the bathroom; and c) if I had sufficient warning I could get myself to the basement again.

But fortunately, as Ray Bradbury so eloquently put it, "Nothing much else happened, all the rest of that night." Amen.