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When I went into the supermarket on this very warm Sunday morning, a woman coming out said, "Good luck in there!" And she wasn't wrong about that. There was only one shopping cart left in the foyer of the store. I headed straight for the aisle where the water lives: nothing, nada. I decided to try paper products next. But as I was on my way to that other aisle, I found something unexpected: a few 24-packs of half-liter bottles of Zephyr Hills spring water. A sign on the shelf-edge said, "2 per household." Fair enough, I hefted two flats of water into my cart.
When I arrived at the paper-products aisle, it looked like the section had been ransacked. Fortunately,
I was able to get a six-pack of facial tissues into my cart before they all disappeared.
Heading to the other side of the store, I bought another bottle of wine, just to be on the safe side. In retrospect, I should have bought some beer, because if we lose our electricity, the house will be unmentionably hot.
That "unmentionably" reminds me of some lines of dialog from the movie "El Norte." Maybe some of you have seen it. A young Guatemalan man had just started hitchhiking through Mexico, on his way to the US-Mexico border. A driver stopped for him, and he climbed into the cab of the truck. Once the driver took off, the young man said, "hace mucho calor" (it's very hot). The driver looked at him incredulously, and then it seemed that he was going to laugh his panza (paunch) off. "If you want people to believe you're Mexican," he said, "you have to say, '¡hace una chinga de calor!'" (it's hot as fuck!).
Pretty much what we'll be saying if Hurricane Ian causes us to lose our a/c.
The threat to our frozen food, of course, is why Sandy had wanted me to try to buy some ice. As it happened, though, I was driving the Solstice, and now had no room for ice.
I had, though, already been to the gas station, having heard that fuel was going fast, too. It cost me $41 for 3/4 of a tank (nine gallons) of gas. (I only put the good stuff in the Solstice.)
Text and image Copyright © 2022 by Donald C. Traxler aka Yakov Bloom aka Yablom.
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