What Wine Goes With Your Natural Disaster?

Did you encounter a dilemma, wondering what to pair with any of last week's Acts of God? The PA Liquor Control Board has you covered. It seems the PLCB was shocked to discover that after Mayor Nutter told us we might have to spend two weeks indoors staring at our family members in the dark (underwater), we all reached for the bottle. So much so that it made front page news. Liquor sales were up FIVE MILLION DOLLARS MORE than usual.

But back to our question: champagne for earthquakes, I guess because of the whole "yay we lived!" vibe? And red wine for hurricanes, because it doesn't need to be refrigerated and remember when M Nutt said two weeks? I'd go with a California Zinfandel because it's strong so it'll last. Sadly we'll never have any numbers for beer, since our archaic Quaker alcohol-selling system keeps it separate from the hard stuff. But I'm thinking IPA's for hurricanes--they were meant to travel to/from India and not lose their taste. Or maybe a stout, since if you can't cook it could also be a meal?

Drink up Philly!

Day 22: What the Hurricane Taught Me

Bitch.

So....Irene.  I live in one of the floodier parts of town, and although I'm up the hill from the river a ways, I'm at the bottom of a small ridge so all the water runs down from the hill and spills into my street, and manhole geysers are a pretty regular thing here. So who could tell whether my first-floor apartment was going to food or not? It was a toss-up. But I decided to wait and see what would happen, and besides if I did flood I wanted to be there to move my Harry Potter books off the bottom shelf of my bookcase. So I hunkered down by myself in my apartment with my supplies: "non-perishable food items" in the form of wine, frozen pizza, chips and salsa, wine, the biggest jar of reduced-fat Skippy I could find, and wine; also my lantern, batteries, duct tape, and a 1000-page book with dragons in it. Oddly, the duct tape was the thing that reassured me most of all. I could duct tape the cracks in the door frame and then the water wouldn't get in? Yes, I did this, laugh at me.

You know what sucks about being all alone during a hurricane?

Ev. Er. Y. THING.

AC-Induced Existential Crises and the Self-Sufficient Single Lady: A Beginner's Guide

Pictured: Malevolence

Congratulations!  You're an Independent Single Lady!  You take care of business when there is such which has needs of which to be taken care!  Throw your hat up in the air.

At some point in your success-twirling dance, you will become very sweaty, and notice that your AC is broken.  Probably your first tip-off will be the screeching death throes of the motor.  So you set to cycling through fan speeds at different tempos to trick it, doing the turn-on-turn-off dance to see if maybe it's just exhausted? And then resort to violence, but only as a last resort because you want your security deposit back some day.