Late Night Adrenaline Shots

The hurricane tourists are out in full force.

I walk Broad and Grace Streets every Sunday morning and they're both usually like ghost towns. I'm lucky to see three people in three miles of walking. Not so today where it was like a street festival and everyone had a phone or a camera.

Couples strolled hand in hand, only pausing to snap pictures of crushed cars and downed trees. People in cars drove slower than I walk to point and exclaim over what they saw.

Yes, it's a beautiful day and well worth being up for, but I question how many of these people would still be in bed if there was no destruction to ogle.

Broad Street was where useless umbrellas had gone to die. They were littered on the sidewalk and stuffed in trash cans, their broken spokes testament to their worthlessness.

A window had blown out and the shards of glass scattered across the sidewalk. Over on Grace, some of the sidewalks became impassable due to broken branches and fallen trees and I had to take to the street. On Allen between Broad and Monument, the devastation was widespread. Both sides of Allen on either side of the median were covered in enormous dead trees.

The fire department had several trucks there, no doubt intending to take care of the situation or maybe just shoo away the paparazzi. And still, people gathered at the yellow tape lines to get better pictures. Coming soon to a FB page near you!

The extent of the devastation for me came from four little leaks in my bedroom ceiling. When Irene's wrath began yesterday, a drip started and I put a pan under it. By the time I went to bed, I had four drips and four pans but not a lot of accumulated drippage in them.

Apparently it was enough because at 3:06, a large chunk of ceiling crashed to the floor, waking me up like a shot (and probably my downstairs neighbors, too).

It's hard to come down from an adrenaline rush like that.

I wasn't about to get up and do anything about it, so I rolled over and began thinking about puppies and rainbows nothing I'm going to admit to here and finally fell asleep after about an hour.

A second slightly smaller piece crashed down around 6 a.m., but I was a pro at being terrorized awake by then and fell right back to sleep.

When I got up, I saw that the floor around two sides of my bed was covered in ceiling chunks and drywall dust. The pans of brown water had bits floating in them. It looked even worse than it had sounded, and that's saying a lot.

Let the record show that I did not take out my camera and document any of it.