Can A Cat Get A Gastric Bypass?

These are the questions we asked one another while trapped in our apartment for Hurricane Sandy. My husband refused to play bananagrams with me because he said it was a last resort activity if power was lost. Instead, he ate copious amounts of junk food as if convinced that the preservative-laden non-perishables we'd purchased for the pending emergency were to be consumed out of boredom. No, the idea is to eat perishables while you still have electricity and use them up and then if you can't buy anything or get to the store or the stores were crushed by hundreds of trees falling or ripped out of the ground by vicious winds, you'd have pop tarts, beef jerky and bags of moist soup rations to sustain you. Soup comes in bags now.

He panicked on Saturday and we went to the store to buy piles of scented candles, batteries, and junk food. He didn't know that I happen to own 6 flash lights and that I have them stashed all over the apartment. I keep 2 in my nightstand drawer and would have put one in his, but I didn't want him to play with it and wear out the battery power. I was right to do that. We live down the street from a fire house and our local Red Cross headquarters. In an emergency, I'd be happy to break into either to steal/borrow supplies, so I wasn't worried about the storm. He spent the day circling the windows and waiting for something to crash through the windshield of his car. He refused to let me rent a movie on Amazon because he was convinced the power would go out at any minute and he didn't want to pay $4 for something he couldn't watch. That's fair. Instead, we watched the local news teams discuss the storm and its potential for unholy destruction for about 8 hours.

In many places it was bad and we're so lucky that here, it wasn't. We heard some banging at one point and I went outside to investigate, but it was just a plastic trash can hitting a fence, not my scooter being ripped from its lock and flying through a car windshield, as predicted. I'm still getting news reports from friends and relatives in other towns and states - a few without power, most are just fine (although nobody from NY has checked in yet). What is it about natural disasters that makes those news stories and photo slideshows so addictive? I hope for the best for all the rest and that our region of the country hasn't been decimated too much to recover swiftly. If New York City becomes the Alabama of the North, we're all screwed.