Having just weathered Hurricane Fiona, the strongest to hit Canada on record, I have a few notes:

• Everyone in my circle and as far as I can see around me is safe.
• I’ve never felt my house shake in a storm – but I did this time.
• We had a lot of close calls, but no major damage to property.
• There was a lot to clean up (branches, sticks, leaves, trash, etc.)
• Our power was out for an entire week (even longer for others).
• It gets dark early! We really rely on our artificially-extended days to keep up with life.
• A BBQ with a burner was a life-saver. We cooked a ton of decent meals, and boiled a LOT of water.
• There was no interruption to our municipal water supply (we could flush the toilets!).
• It takes a LONG time to boil water.
• Cleaning out the fridge after a week wasn’t as bad as I expected.
• Cleaning out the freezer after a week was was much worse than I expected.
• The mobile network was unreliable. Text messages wouldn’t go through, and then would go through 10 times repeatedly. Mobile data was like the weather, coming and going as it pleased – never there when you need it.
• The clean-up and recovery mobilization at a large-infrastructure level has been impressive (tree removal, power line repair, etc.).
• Solar panels are awesome, but people don’t realize that most residential solar installations can’t generate power when the grid is down. For now, the only option is a $10,000-$20,000+ battery installation.
• A similar outage in winter would have been much more dangerous. Keeping warm and keeping pipes from freezing would be difficult and has me thinking of contingency plans.