Yots and yots of candy

Chris Cristy ordered the great state of New Jersey to change Halloween to Monday, November 5th. Weird, right?

Well for those who do not know, hurricane Sandy came through with great devastation, property damage and electricity shortages. For safety reasons, Halloween was postponed. When we went out to trick-or-treat today, I was not sure how many people would be with the program, handing out candy, but we thought we would give it a try. Kids were excited about their costumes. Lydia was a mermaid, Tyler was a ninja turtle and Nyle--- a parrot. It's actually very appropriate and obvious- Lydia loves mermaid movies, Tyler loves playing ninja turtles video games and Nyle is a perfect parrot. He repeats everything he hears and says about 10 times.

Rita and Taji went trick-or-treating with us. It was fun, but very cold. Kids were freezing. Houses we went to were giving out great big chocolate candy bars. Kids were thrilled, especially Nyle. He was not sure what this walking tour was all about until we hit 3rd house and he received his 3rd big candy bar. Then all we heard as we walked from house to house was Nyle's squilly voice yelling "Yots and yots of candy" and he was running to the next door step. We all thought that was so cute.

Disaster Area

On Tuesday we woke up to find the damage that was done by Hurricane Sandy on Monday night.  It was hard to sleep through all the wind.  I kept going downstairs to check that the basement wasn't flooding or anything during the night.  But in the morning we woke to find our worst fears, shown in the picture below:

In seriousness, we were remarkably blessed not to have any damage to our property.  Even this trampoline is not actually broken, believe it or not.  I restored it to health in about 15 minutes.

We did experience a small piece of the emergency.  Our power went out on Monday night around 10pm and was off until the early morning on Wednesday.  That meant that Tuesday was an interesting day.  The house got cold.  Our food in the fridge was heating up despite our effort to keep the door closed (so we gave the food to a friend who had power).  Our ice cream melted even though we put in in a cooler covered in ice (needs to be much colder than 0C apparently).  We had to figure out what to eat.  By the evening we had a fire going and had set up our  propane camping stove in the garage.  Although, we never had to use it because we found Wendy's open as we were driving to Home Depot to get a hose for the stove.


Our neighborhood did have a considerable amount of damage we found as we walked around.  Both of these pictures are a short walk from our house.  The first is the kids' elementary school, which has been closed all week.  The second might help explain why some of our neighbors still don't have power.

Today I took my mother-in-law to the JFK airport.  Her flight was rescheduled from Wednesday because of the hurricane.  We filled up gas here near my house, with only a 5-10 minute wait in a line of cars.  The roads were very clear all the way to the airport---a huge contrast from yesterday when we tried to get to the airport before finding out that the flight was canceled.  Today's trip was the fastest I remember getting to the airport.  Yesterday, we spent hours travelling what is usually 30 minutes up the road.

The route we take to the airport goes right across Staten Island.  It wasn't until this evening that I found out how severe the situation is in Staten Island, with power out, floods, and gasoline lines that take several hours. It's hard to believe that I can drive right through on the freeway without knowing how bad it is all around.

I'm very glad I filled up gas when I did.