Nothing to see here, move along.

Well after being on a roll and posting a bunch of stuff in the space of two weeks, I've hit another dry spot. Mostly it is because I've been working 12-hour days for the last three weeks and by the time I get home all I want to do is fall face down on the couch like a giant blubbery invertebrate.

I'd also probably blame it on the fact that when you work 12-hour days, life tends to get very one-dimensional and boring. You wake up, you go to work, you drink a cup of coffee, you scratch your head and your balls and decide you need a shit and then you go home. You then repeat this formula until you suffer a bald-spot, raw balls and an anal prolapse.

It was at some point last week, just shortly before I was considering scratching my head and taking a jobby that the earthquake hit. A few days after that, sometime between the morning coffee and a deadening conversation with the bus driver, Michael Bloomberg came on the telly and said we should all prepare to die because there was a really big fucking swirly thing in the sky and the weathermen said it was heading straight for New York City. Hello Hurricane Irene.

The earthquake was definitely an interesting experience since it was my first. Yes, I never even knew I had it but I lost my earthquake virginity.

I work in the 2nd floor a beautiful old art deco building built in 1930. Solid stone and definitely not the kind of thing that will fall down easily. It is for that reason that when the building started to shake it was doubly disturbing. If I worked in some new crappy paper-mache construction I could understand the shaking but I work in the Robert Mitchum of buildings; old and hard as fuck.

The first few seconds felt just like a big truck going past, we all kind of looked at each other and shrugged our shoulders. Then a wave came through, literally a wave, there was a trough and a crest of shaking power and you could feel it. At that point every sphincter in the room collectively tightened, kind of like they do whenever the Pope is around.

What the fuck....

Some of the people who were here were in the same room on 9/11 when the World Trade Center came down and as it is only a few blocks away I think that was the first thought in everybody's mind. Another attack....

We switched on the TV (kind of ironic considering I am a TV broadcast engineer) and immediately every channel was full of earthquake this and earthquake that. There was a palatable sense of relief around the room that it was at least safe to step outside however also a sense of disbelief since those kind of things never happen in New York.

No-one died, no buildings fell down, some people went nuts but more people went drinking and enjoyed the moment. Then Bloomberg came on the telly, put on his best Cane Toad face and told us all to get the fuck out of New York because death was riding in on a cloud.

The collective relief of having survived an earthquake quickly dissipated and mass psychosis took over instead. Everybody headed to the supermarket and bought every packet of crisps they could get their hands on. Frozen pizzas flew off the shelves and every chocolate bar in New York City was squirreled away to a safe deposit box under the floorboards as people determined that if they were going to die, then they would die like big fat Americans.

I walked into the supermarket after work the Thursday before the hurricane was due to hit. I remember thinking "Wow, this isn't so bad, there are a lot of fruit and veg left" but then I passed through the healthy stuff to junk food area and it was completely cleaned out. I saw one guy walk past with 5 frozen pizzas in his basket, I wanted to point out that you can't really cook frozen pizza by candle-light but thought better of it.

On Friday I cleaned out my backyard of all potential flying objects, even the bowl of salsa that had been sitting outside for 3 weeks since our last party was brought inside much to the disgust of the bugs that had been eating it. The toys had to come in too the last thing I wanted to do was die by being hit on the head by a flying Dora The Explorer chair. That would be embarrassing. Almost as embarrassing as being decapitated by a flying Phil Collins album.

When the storm came on Saturday, I could be found online examining FEMA floodmaps, all of which helpfully showed that the flood plain ended two houses away from me. Not very reassuring. All I needed was for one junk food bloated American to go for a swim and my basement would be ruined!

On Saturday afternoon the winds got up and didn't stop for a full 16 hours. I'm sure I've been in windier gusts but I'd never seen anything as sustained as this, it just blew constantly and hard.

I have a giant maple tree outside the back of my house and that thing started to dance like mad. I looked out my window before going to bed and it was like the tree from Poltergeist, at any moment you felt like one of the branches was going to fly in and grab you. Needless to say we pushed the wardrobe in front of the window and went to sleep.

Next morning I almost didn't want to open my eyes, I was afraid to go downstairs in case it was flooded. In the end I actually jumped out of bed because we got a phone call from from the power company saying they were about to cut off the electricity due to flooding. I ran downstairs to make a pot of coffee before this happened and thankfully it was dry. We had a wee bit of water in the basement but nothing too serious.

Unfortunately the same cannot be said for people only half-an-hour down the road.

There has been a lot of talk of government over-reacting to this storm but my gut says we were just really fucking lucky it wasn't worse. Cane toad face did the right thing.

So anyway, as you can see, I've had nothing to write about. Hopefully it stays like this.