Of Mice and Men and Hurricanes

For weeks, Doug and I have been planning our first overnight at our recently renovated beach cottage.  The plan was for me and my daughter Christine to run a 5K at 11:00 a.m., and then Doug and I would be on our way.

Well, things kind of went that way.  Christine and I both won our age groups, and she enjoyed the post-race food provided by Buffalo Wild Wings.  The choices were limited for me, though, since I'm a vegetarian--I gave my food to Doug.

After the race, we packed up our kitten Pax and headed down to the beach. Pax did great in the car and made himself at home quickly once we got there.  He explored, had a snack, used his litterbox and then tried out both of our wicker chairs to see which one he liked better:

They both seemed to meet his kitty standards:

Doug did what every guy wants to do on a Saturday afternoon when projects have been completed--took a nap.  I should have taken a picture of him, but it seemed kind of mean to expose him like that.

I baked peanut butter cookies in our new kitchen:

and installed some new clip-on lamps that I had bought for our bed. It looked so cozy, I almost wished it was bedtime already:

I even took a short walk on the beach while Doug cat sat. 

It looks pretty peaceful in this photo:

But we knew when we went down on Saturday afternoon that this would not be the weekend we had dreamed about because Hurricane Sandy was on its way. All afternoon and evening, we went back and forth between admiring our cozy little cottage and wondering whether it would still be there by Halloween.

At about 8:00 on Saturday night, the fire police knocked on our door and told us we had to be out by 8:00 the next morning. Kitts Hummock, with the Delaware Bay on one side and coastal marshland surrounding it on the others, is very prone to flooding.  With a hurricane, a nor'easter, and a full moon on the way, a mandatory evacuation order had been implemented.  There is only one way in and out of Kitts Hummock, and we took the warning seriously.

We planned to get up by 7:30 and be on our way.  But Pax had other plans.  He spent most of the night sleeping out in the living room but woke me up by jumping on my head at 4:30 a.m. I'm an early riser anyway, so I figured I would just get up and keep him away from Doug. I was lying on the couch reading at 5:30 when I heard Pax scrambling around behind the couch.  He came out with a mouse dangling from his mouth.

He's only 6 months old and spends half of his waking hours playing with his extensive collection of toy mice, some of which look disturbingly real: 

To him, this was just another toy.  He kept dropping it, waiting for it to move, picking it up again, dropping it....

But he dropped it one too many times and lost it.  The mouse escaped, stunned but uninjured.

So even though it was only 6:00, we were all awake and we figured we might as well just get going.  Doug is NOT an early riser, but I bribed him with a promise to stop at Wawa for coffee and a breakfast sandwich.

We were home by 7:30 a.m., and Doug went back to bed. I think he woke up wondering if the whole crazy mess--fire police knocking on the door, the cat jumping on our bed, a mouse running around the house, and a hurricane barreling toward our property--was all just a dream.