The Nightmare Before Halloween

Also known as Sandy! Well after taking an unintentional month's break from blogging, I certainly could not have anticipated my first post back would be about  my random thoughts and the unthinkable devastation that we are all seeing on the news. 

Walking in the neighborhood. The beautiful calm before the storm


Although for the last decade we have made the southern coastline our beach destination, the New Jersey shore was the vacation destination of my husband's family since the 1920's. Cape May, New Jersey was the first beach my own children ever experienced.  This area, along with many I was not familiar until Sandy, seem to be all but wiped out by water, sand or fires. It's hard not to get emotional over the images I've seen, though I don't know a single person living in these areas.

I took this photo from the French doors in our kitchen just before it got too dark and the storm really ramped up.
 And, in case I never saw these majestic trees again! The tree to the left soars high above all the roof lines
 and is the tallest and widest tree in the neighborhood.
 Not comforting during storms!

That left me wondering how you all fared? We were beyond lucky. We had power outages for just a brief time, and though the winds howled and the rain was relentless, not a single tree came down. Just two are leaning over. We braced for the worse and stayed in the basement, but compared to the damage of the Derecho storm this summer, Hurricane Irene, and the Blizzard of 2009/2010 we got off with barely a scratch.

Our backyard.
Irregular flagstone path just after installation. The very next day, the ground was covered again in leaves.
The little rock wall with 2 Hosta (the only plants in this bed still living!) I built years ago and our landscaper said it could stay :)


Ironically, we had just installed the new landscape plan for the backyard including the installation of an in-ground sprinkler system and flagstone path. The ground is so unsteady between the work and all the rain, I'm afraid to even walk on it. Just from the deck, I can see things have sunk and shifted and though I am concerned what will survive and/or need to be re-done, I feel so incredibly lucky that our house didn't flood and the 2 tallest trees in the neighborhood, located in our backyard, did not fall onto our house or our neighbors.

New sod...approved!


Oddly, this was the first year ever, I did not purchase a single pumpkin, mum, cabbage or put out a single Halloween decoration inside the house and though it was an incredible busy month with wrapping up our house hunting, overseeing the landscaping installation and trying to finish up my final client projects of the year, I'm not sure it really had anything to do with any of these things. Last year, I only did pumpkins. Could that have been the forecast of things to come? If not for the calender, I would not even know it was Halloween. Scary.