62. September 2nd, 2010 Picture.

September 2nd was a day where we really thought the world was coming to an end.  Hurricane Earl was barreling towards us and the weather channels were doing nothing to calm the hysteria.  It was a Friday, and I left work early in fear that I was going to be stranded in my office, which was clearly not an option.  I'd rather throw myself out the window then spend 1 second here longer than necessary.  It was the Friday of Labor Day weekend, so this storm concerned me more than others since Labor Day is one of my favorite holidays of the year.  I know it's random, but my family is a Labor Day family, with a huge party every year.  It's infamous.

I was glad that the bad weather was hitting on Friday, which meant that the weather should clear up by Sunday, the day of the party.  They were predicting some pretty horrible weather, so I made plans to spend the night at Ratty's house so we could ride out the storm together.  We bought supplies, like wine and cheese, and hunkered down for a ridiculous hurricane.  The blinds in Ratty's apartment were drawn, so we had no idea what was happening outside, all we knew was that it was supposed to be nasty.  Around 7pm, about the time they anticipated the rain to start, I looked out the window and saw nothing.  According the news, the storm should be rolling in at any minute, so I put the blinds down and went back to sipping my Sauvignon Blanc.  Ratty wanted to go up on the roof and see what the city looked like pre-storm, so I followed suit.  The clouds were so thick that we couldn't see the tops of buildings.  Skyscrapers who had 75 stories were suddenly 'missing' and the entire cityscape was completely out of side.  It was pretty eerie; I'd never seen such non-fog, low clouds before.  The wind was picking up and we could see some bolts of lightening, so we made our way back inside. 

Fast forward a few hours and it still hadn't start to rain.  We kept waiting and waiting for the storm to start, but nothing ever happened!  The meteorologists on TV had pinpointed this storm down to the second, and somehow, no one anticipated that it would completely miss us.  It never rained!  How crazy is that?  We completely missed a HURRICANE.  What a waste of mass panic.