I’m a Midwest girl, born and raised, so my idea of a ‘big storm’ involves snow.  A lot of snow.  We don’t get big storms like Irene here, you see.  We get bad storms, tornadoes, and flooding, but we don’t generally get all of those things at the same time and for extended durations.  When we do, they come up quickly, without much warning, and it takes a while to recover simply because we’re not used to things like this.  It happened in July 2003, when a freak storm took out trees all over northern Illinois, leaving many without power for the better part of a week.  We lost all the food in our fridge, but were  thankful to not sustain damage on the house we would close on at the end of the week.

I’m more intimately familiar with big winter storms, the sort that blanket everything in a foot of snow in a few hours, making it difficult to do anything other than hunker down with soup and blankets and a good movie.  In case of winter storms:

1. Hope and pray that your employer at least occasionally closes for inclement weather.  Mine doesn’t.
2. If your employer doesn’t close for inclement weather, try to make work-from-home arrangements.
3. Obsessively listen to the news in hopes that for once, your employer has changed their mind about closing for inclement weather.
4. Decide to be a bigger person than your employer and cancel class – even though it’s online – because who wants to be the jerk that makes everyone go to school when the campus is closed?
5. Arm yourself with a snow shovel, bag of salt, yak trax, many layers, and ibuprofen for the inevitable shoveling aches and pains.
6. Start praying that the plowing company actually shows up this time AND doesn’t plow your car IN rather than out.
7. Seal the windows with plastic, though you’ve probably already done that at the first sign of temps below 20.
8. Start a pot of soup when you get home from work.
9. Complain about how no one can drive in the snow EVEN THOUGH IT HAPPENS EVERY YEAR.
10. Update the Netflix queue and hope that the internet stays up.

Ten on Tuesday is a listserv-driven meme thingamagig.