This is a non-writing related post.  I just wanted to make a quick post for the day to tell everyone on the East Coast to be safe with this massive storm approaching.

I think it’s easy for us to underestimate the damage that Mother Nature can do.  It certainly is for me.  But if you stop and think about it, most people who live in large urban areas are dependent on a whole host of logistics and support that can get wiped out in a storm like this.  And you assume that it’ll all get fixed because that’s the way it’s supposed to work, but sometimes there’s so much to fix that you’re on your own for quite a while.

Situations like this are very tricky.  You don’t want to overreact, but you also don’t want to underreact.  The closest I came to a situation like this was when I was traveling.  I was in Cambodia when there was a coup in Thailand.  I’d left the majority of my bags at the Thai airport and had to decide whether to return to a country with tanks in the street or whether to just fly home from Cambodia and abandon my bags.

Fortunately, I had a little insight into the situation that the news coverage confirmed (and I was fortunate enough to have news coverage unlike some of my friends), so I flew back grabbed my bags and flew home.  I never left the airport and from my perspective I wouldn’t have even known about the coup if I hadn’t seen the coverage from Cambodia.  But I could have just as easily been flying back into a conflict area and felt incredibly stupid endangering my life for two bags of crap that I didn’t really need.

So, stock up on food, go somewhere safer if you can, and don’t risk your life on “stuff” if it does get bad.