Come on Irene.

There's never a dull moment when you live on the East Coast. This is something that we learned really early on, and this week was definitely no exception.

The excitement all started on Tuesday, August 23. Right around 1:50 pm the ground began to rumble...I was sitting at my desk at work and I knew it was an earthquake RIGHT when the ground started to shake. It was very subtle at first, so I looked around at my co-workers to see if any one else was feeling it. Heads started to turn when the rumbling got stronger and that's when I dove under my desk. I tried to calmly tell everyone else, "This is an earthquake, you might want to get under your desks." BUT, they all just stared at me like I was the biggest weird-o.  Bunch of idiots, I would have been the only one to survive if the earthquake was bigger :)

This will come as no shock to people that know my dad, but literally about 2 minutes after the earthquake happened, I got a text from my dad asking me if I felt the earthquake. How did he already know?? Well, he is ALWAYS watching the news and he'll tell you news that's happening by you before you even know it yourself. This made me laugh.

Shortly after the quake, I was evacuated from my office building and told to go home for the rest of the day. Booya! You don't have to tell me to leave work twice!! I couldn't get a hold of Mike because cell phone service was so backed up in our area, so I called my dad to tell him that I was sent home from work, and we both just laughed at how dramatic people are out here. If we were in LA and a 5.9 earthquake happened, we would just keep on working. NO BIG DEAL.

Well, Mike was also sent home from work (along with every other person in the entire area), so as you can imagine, the streets were NUTS! The metro was still running, but at reduced speeds, and the trains were packed. After only taking the metro for one stop, he decided it would be faster to just run. So poor Mike had to RUN home from work. Fortunately, he had work out clothes with him.

He was sooo exhausted when he finally got home. Running in the middle of the day with the ridiculous humidity here would normally be a TERRIBLE idea, but under these circumstances it was the best option he had.

After all the dust settled from the earthquake, Mike and I went shopping and enjoyed an afternoon when we didn't have to be a work :) It was glorious.

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Well, it was one natural disaster to the next...hurricane Irene was making its way up the East Coast and EVERYONE was talking about it. I can't even tell you how many grocery/drug stores Mike and I went to in an attempt to stock up on water, flashlights, and batteries. Couldn't find anything anywhere! It was actually really frustrating. We finally were able to get the supplies that we needed and we were ready for Irene.

This is what the sky looked like on Saturday morning as we were making our last-minute preparations. Kinda SCARY!

This was our water supply. We didn't have to evacuate or anything , but we were told to be ready for power outages because I guess the power goes out pretty easily in our area (sometimes even when it gets too hot in the summer).

Mike was on storm watch and I was in charge of making treats and keeping us happy.

We don't have a couch yet, so we just layed on our air mattress all day and night. The news stations kept telling everyone to "hunker down". I've never heard of "hunkering" in my life, what does that even mean?? Well, we didn't leave our house from 3 pm on Saturday until about 3 pm on Sunday. (I think we did a good job trying to hunker.) Our church meetings were canceled because of the hurricane, so we just enjoyed a nice relaxing day at home because nothing even happened to us. Not even a flicker of the lights! Millions of people lost power in Virginia, so I guess we were some of the lucky ones.  The only damage Irene did to us was make our backs hurt from laying around for hours :) We survived!