# How’s Everybody Holding Up?

“Why would you want to move out to Wisconsin?” everybody said. “It’s freezing cold there,” they said. “All it does is snow,” they said. “It’s nothing but cheese and fat people,” they said. The last part is true, but for the most part I haven’t had any issues with the weather since I made the trek out here in the summer of ’08. It’s actually been a running joke between my family and some of my friends back east that ever since I left, it’s been the east coast that’s taken a pounding while I’ve just had to deal with a little snow. Blizzards, flooding, you name it. I even brought the joke up again to my mom when I called home on Sunday morning.

Well the joking came to a pretty abrupt halt yesterday afternoon when I finally got a few minutes to check in and see exactly how bad the damage from Hurricane Sandy really was. I’ve been at the big annual indsutry trade show with my company since Monday morning, and really hadn’t had any chance to hop on the interwebs or turn on a TV to get the scoop. Outside of a few texts back and forth to my mom to see if her power had come back on in CT, I had no clue. Watching video clips of the Con Ed explosion on my co-worker’s iPhone, seeing pictures of the flooding in the subways, and reading reports about just how much water there was in certain areas made me realize just how bad this storm was and just how lucky I was to be removed from it.

What really hit home was seeing how bad the situation was in Long Beach Island, New Jersey. My dad’s side of the family has been going there since he was a kid, and some of my fondest childhood memories are from family vacations I took there when I was a kid. I’ve spent many an hour in the Fantasy Island arcade pumping quarters into “The Simpsons” arcade game trying to beat the whole game with my cousin. I’ve eaten breakfast at The Chicken or The Egg more times than I can count. To see pictures of those places with what looked like a couple feet of standing water in front of them and reading that the ocean spillover was so bad in some areas that it met the bay was just shocking to me.

I know we’re not talking real “end of days” stuff here, so I don’t want to get too melodramatic as an outsider to all of it, but I do still consider Connecticut my home and I have a lot of friends and almost my entire family back in the tri-state area. As far as I know, they are all safe and sound, just without power, and I sincerely hope that’s the case for everybody else out there. The little bit of info I was able to get from my fellow TYA writers last night makes it sound like some of them had it pretty rough, and with nothing going up on the site yesterday I have to imagine that a lot of them are stuck without power right now too.

So wherever you are out there, TYA readers and Yankee fans, I hope you made it through this ordeal safe and dry. It seems to me like it’s still going to be at least a few days before things start getting back to normal in the areas most affected, but as someone who was lucky enough to be removed from the action I figure it’s the least I can do to try to bring a small bit of normalcy back. If you’ve at least got power and you haven’t already gone mad from watching the same talking heads spout the same garbage on ESPN, swing by TYA today and we’ll talk a little Yankee baseball.

_P.S.- I’m a little surprised that nobody has blamed the hurricane damage on A-Rod_