So Hurricane Irene has done her worst and can I tell you something? We humans have become total wimps, yours truly at the forefront. Take power away and we become a bunch of sniveling, complaining crybabies. Cold showers! No electronic devices! Have to lift the garage door MANUALLY! Where's my ice? What about my laundry? HOW DO I CHARGE MY COMPUTER/IPAD/PHONE???? Three days without power and my town is acting like the Donner party. My husband makes jokes about braising the family pet (don't worry he won't, I'll go before the beloved dog will).

And the wrath being focussed on the local power utility is bottomless.

WHERE ARE THE TRUCKS?

WHERE ARE THE WORKERS?

I SEE NO LINES DOWN!

WHY DOES THE STREET OVER HAVE POWER AND WE DON'T???

You get my drift.

A low point for me was when I went to the local deli for a toasted bagel to find that they had sold out long before. They had been swamped, it seems, with people, like me, desperate for something hot and crunchy for breakfast. This lack of a toasted warm something almost made me demented. I had actually gone for a run and endured a freezing shower with the image of this bagel held in the front of my mind like the proverbial carrot before the donkey's nose. The guy behind the counter backed away when he saw the expression in my eyes when he delivered the devastating lack of bagel status. I looked around to see if there was someone elderly or lame with a bagel who I could take down. No such luck.

The lowest blow came when they put off opening school for another day. It was supposed to open today. Then tomorrow. And now they have put it off until...when? They didn't say except for an ambiguous "when the roads are safe". At this point I would airlift my kids to school. That day when schedules return to normal, when we don't have pull our teenagers out of bed in time for dinner, when we don't have the spend an entire day white knuckled in the passenger seat of the car as our 16 year olds attempt to drive, when our 12 years olds don't spend the entire time whining to go to the mall, this is a sacred day my friends. AND IT HAS BEEN DENIED ME.

So Irene, you're dead to me. Talk to the hand.

I'm hot, and not in a good way.

This is how bad a blogger I am: it just took me a half an hour to find and log into my blog. That is pretty pathetic. What I did find, however, is that there are many others who go by the handle "befrazzled" so I might have to think of another. Who knew? Maybe if I blogged enough to actually know how to easily access my account I would have been aware of this.

Today we are going to discuss something that all my friends and family and pretty much anyone in my immediate vicinity are sick of hearing about: hot flashes. I talk about them incessantly because they are ruining my quality of life. Sleeping is the biggest issue. Sleeping used to be a very pleasant pastime that I remember fondly. Sleeping has now become something that happens briefly between hot flashes. I who could sleep through pretty much everything and then lounge happily around in bed for a hour even after waking up can now only sleep for a couple hours at a time before waking up and feeling like someone has set my bed on fire. When someone asked me to describe the feeling (or maybe they didn't ask me, I just volunteered it) I told them it's like being a pizza: one moment you're lying on this nice wooden slab, and the next thing you know you are sliding into Hell. And the attractive feeling of lying in a pool of sweat, we wouldn't want that to go unmentioned.

One of the problems with sleeping so intermittently is that when I do catch a couple of hours between sweatstorms I tend to sleep heavily. That means I snore. This is a subject for another blog but yes, ladies, let's admit that snoring is not just for men. My own mother snores like a buzzsaw. In fact, in my household, my husband is the quiet sleeper. He plays the traditional woman's role of telling me to roll over or poking me until I readjust my position. So the other night he woke me up several times to get me to stop making noise and even yelled at me (quietly, it was the middle of the night after all). In the morning he had to face the wrath of a sleep deprived maniac. I pretty much told him that I could have killed him and no jury would have convicted me. I think that I will not be awakened for mild infractions like snoring in the future.

I was thinking of the time 40 years ago when I had my first visit from every woman's monthly killjoy. When I was told I would continue to have this monthly visit every month into my '50's with only brief interludes for pregnancy, I was suitably horrified. And here I am, at the end of my 4 decade joy ride and what greets me? Hot flashes.

You just know God is a man.

Seriously?

Okay, over a year since my last post. And perhaps it will be over a year to my next post. One never knows with me. Life does get in the way after all. And really, does anyone really care? I still haven't figured out why I am doing this.

Right now I am on Nantucket. That makes me sound all glam and hedge fund-like but we are all really pig-piled into a house that a friend rented and then offered to share with us for a week for a reasonable fee (Note: I find that the best way to sustain friendships with friends who have more than I do is not to always accept gifts of kindness, but to keep things business-like on a certain level. That way they don't think you are a mooch and therefore continue to offer you nice things like a share in a house at a reasonable price and you don't think that you are a mooch and have low self-esteem and begin to resent the fact that they have more than you). Anyway, back to Nantucket. Was there ever a more beautiful island? Oh I can hear the laptop keys tip-tapping away like crazy with suggestions like "Aruba!" "Tahiti!" "Oahu!" and in all honesty I haven't been to any of those places but I still feel like Nantucket is the place. Have you ever been to a place where the cares and woes of the everyday world seem to melt away the minute you arrive? Such is Nantucket for me. The beaches are beautiful and the waters restorative (if, uh, refreshing). Even when I paint landscapes of Nantucket I feel myself relaxing into the memory of the place. And yes, there are a lot of large houses and wealthy people parading around in pastels and pants with whales on them but they are mostly in town or behind the hydrangea bushes of their compounds. Do I wish I had an easy mil or so to buy a house here? Sure. But as long as I can scratch the money together to come for a week a summer I'll be happy.