Waiting for a hurricane is always some mix of stress and tedium.

Waiting for a Category 5 hurricane ups the stress, doesn’t change the tedium.

After a really nice weekend with the BBE, highlights of which included my favorite patio in downtown Sanford; a morning of flea market shopping, and an excellent movie (The Wild Robot), Monday was less fun. Which is a little unfair to my Monday — we actually had a nice, albeit rainy, walk in the morning, and a good lunch at a Mexican restaurant over in Mount Dora — but it was a day spent feeling like the clock was ticking.

Tick, tick, tick, do ALL the things.

Really, there’s not a tremendous amount to do. We tied down the furniture on my parents porch; I dropped the BBE off at the airport; I filled my gas tank; I plugged in everything that needs to be charged, including my battery pack for jumpstarting my car; I moved my own porch chairs and outdoor carpets into a shed in the backyard, and then… Jamie made coffee.

Like, a lot of coffee.

Because I don’t honestly expect that the storm itself is going to damage us much. It’ll hit the coast sometime tomorrow, and that’s going to be super ugly, no doubt about it. This isn’t going to be one of those storms where afterward it feels like the news media was just having a slow news day. But those folks are going to get the brunt of it. This far inland, we’re currently expecting 44-55 MPH winds, with gusts up to 70 MPH. That’s about 100 MPH less than they’re expecting at the coast.

That said, we will lose power. And maybe we’ll lose power for a long time. I’m going to be surprised if it’s more than a week, but I’m not going to be surprised at all if it’s 3-5 days. I don’t have a grill here, or even my camp stove — I lost both of them in the move — so that means no cooking, not even boiling water. I’d already bought a couple cases of water, so I think we’ll be okay on drinking water, but I do not want to spend the next five days with a caffeine withdrawal headache. So yeah, hurricane prep = making a big stockpile of frozen coffee, so that we’ve got a week’s worth just in case.

Today’s plan: to cook all, or most of, the food in the freezer. I’ve got a pork tenderloin, two packages of chicken thighs, and a package of ground turkey. For me, that’s way more than a week’s worth of meat, but I’m figuring I’ll cook it all while I can, then stick it back in the freezer so it lasts as long as possible.

I might also make one last run to a store for, of all things, a notebook and maybe a couple pens. I’m not going to be able to recharge my computer until we have power back, so I won’t be able to work, but it might be nice to be able to write even without power. I anticipate being very bored this upcoming weekend. And I currently do not own ANYTHING on which I could write. No stash of scrap paper, no typing paper, no old half-used paper journals, no nothing. Literally, no paper. If I decided I wanted to write, I’d be absolutely out of luck, which is a really weird realization. So I might try to solve that problem before it becomes a problem, although I expect all stores are going to be unpleasantly crowded with people panic buying, so maybe not, too.

And then we wait. I fully expect that we’ll have no internet for a while after tomorrow, but I’m going to try to show some restraint today and not doom-scroll all day long, even though the temptation is very much there. Mostly because I wasn’t doom-scrolling over the weekend, too busy having fun, and while I wasn’t looking Milton went from “just another storm” to “OMFG, maybe it’s time to run.” (More for the people on the coast than for me, though.) Still, that’s really an unpleasant thing to have happen while you’re not looking, IMO.

Deciding what choices to make is probably the worst part of preparing for a disaster. Do I need to fill the spare gas can? Do I have enough canned food? Are candles really necessary in a world with cell phones, flashlights, and USB lights? Is a weather radio useful or just a leftover from the 20th century? But I was talking to a friend on my morning Sophie walk and she has family on the coast. They’re not evacuating, they think they’ll be fine. Maybe they will be. I am very, very, very glad, however, that my decisions are not at all about “Will I survive?” and mostly about “How bored am I going to be?” with a tiny dash of “How uncomfortable am I going to be?”

I’m hoping the answer to both questions is “not very,” but I’ll let you know next week. Meanwhile, if you’re the kind of person who says prayers, add some prayers for Florida to your list. Meteorologists sometimes seem overly pessimistic, but even if their worst-case scenarios don’t happen, Milton looks fierce.

But for now, I wait.