Hurricane Irene and the joy of not having power for a week

When the hurricane blew its way in Susan and I spent our time at home. Now and then the lights would blink. Our neighbor Brenda calls and tells us they have lost power that morning. It is now late afternoon. The lights go out for a minute then come back on. We have a chicken in the oven. We keep thinking - we just need power for 30 more minutes. Well, that is all we got then@ 5:30 the power finally went out.
Susan and I prepared ahead of the storm - got batteries, charged up cell phones, did laundry, and avoided going to the store. No point losing food.
Well, Sunday morning rolls in and the sky is clear. I go out and see the fallen trees and hear the hum of generators. I finally convince my wife we need a generator. This will make the third time in several years we have had a major outage. Between ice storms, Isabel, and now Irene I have had enough of sitting in a dark house.
I head to Home Depot and get one of the few remaining generators. I then head to find gas to run my new toy. This takes an hour just to find a place that had power. This was now a week ago.
Power got restored today.
We went to the beach house for the weekend. Funny thing is the hurricane went right over the beach house but there was no damage and no loss of power.