I was going to post some funny stories about traveling around Italy in a nine-passenger van dubbed “The Black Plague,” but this hurricane business is all I can think about right now.

Although the current forecast (Wednesday, 9/12) shows Florence turning south at the moment, who knows what’s really gonna happen?

The governor has freaked me out, the weather people too, with their dire predictions that Florence will be like nothing we’ve ever seen. “A monster of a storm.”  “A killer.”

photo credit: ncdps.gov

So before leaving my beach house on Monday, I took down pictures near windows that might blow out. My husband tied the picnic table to railings and put deck furniture inside the house.  Then he walked around taking pictures I hope we don’t need: the before shots to give to an insurance company.

The back of the beach house, facing the ocean

Home in Rocky Mount, I joined the chaos in the grocery stores. I had to spring for the more expensive Dasani bottled water over my usual Harris Teeter brand, which had been wiped out.

I brought home a collection of canned goods and snack food.  My husband said it looked like I planned to go camping.

If the power goes out, that’s what we’ll be doing: camping in our house. We don’t have a generator, and I don’t plan to join the line at Lowe’s to get one today.

It was bad enough trying to find gas yesterday. All the pumps at Sheetz were out, so I drove down Highway 43 to the next station.  As I was waiting in line, a store employee stuck her head out the door and yelled, “We’re out of gas!”

I went home and handed the gassing-up job to my husband, who fortunately found a station near our house where the pumps were still working.

You may be old enough to remember that once upon a time before the days of the women’s lib movement, hurricanes always had female names. One reason given: like women, hurricanes were fickle and couldn’t make up their minds.  So not true about women…but hurricanes, we’ve seen, can change course on a whim.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that all this hurricane hysteria will be much ado about nothing, that  Hurricane Florence will turn out to sea.  I can still eat my camping food and eventually drink all that bottled water I bought.