Well here’s my Hurricane Sandy update for you all – it’s been an interesting time and now that I have power and a toilet that flushes, I feel as though I have lived to tell the tale.

The roommates and I made sure to get provisions for a few days but for some reason we decided to eat at last half of them on the first night of being holed up in our apartment. The good news was, we still had power and were able to get through the first night by watching movies in between stuffing our faces.

The next morning started out alright – we all headed out to get a few more supplies to keep us hydrated, candlelit and fatter than ever. We started the movies up again and at 7pm our movie marathon ended abruptly when the power was cut. After repeatedly chanting, “Shit! What the hell do we do without TV and computers! What did people do in ye olden days?!” we lined back up for more food, lit some candles and tried unsuccessfully to fill our bathtubs with water in case our supply was cut off. It turns out even with two lesbians under one roof, our MacGuyver skills proved to be very shitty and all of our hard tub-filling work went down the drain very literally just as soon as we started.

Thankfully, we were all able to hold the worst of it in for two full days. During those days we continued to eat, sleep, get completely mental for a little bit before giving up and taking a walk around the block every few hours and spent a lot of time playing a really fun game called “Telephone Pictionary”, where you each start by writing a common phrase, song lyric, person – basically something that might be fun to draw and not terribly difficult for someone else to guess on a general level. Then you pass the paper on to the next person who draws whatever you wrote; they fold over the original text and hand their drawing to the next person who then writes down their guess for what the drawing is. This text gets passed to the next person who then draws what that last person guessed and so on. When it gets back to the original person the results are read and are generally pretty funny. I learned that I am a much better artist when I can’t see whatever the hell I’m trying to draw. This is good to know and I might add it to my resume.

We ended up losing our water on Monday night and boy could we have really used some of that tub water. Who knew it took so much water to fill the back of your toilet tank and allow it to flush? Certainly not any of us. I ended up getting to desperate that I filled it with some pre-made bottles of Crystal Lite water I had made for our adventure. The toilet looked like a horror film for a while but thankfully it helped with the flushing. By the end of the night last night – the apartment started smelling like the day after a frat party on a hot summer day and that meant it was time for us to think about abandoning ship. I had saved my computer power for emergency phone charging and thankfully it worked.

Our kitchen: Where most of the magic happened and no bite was left behind.

Our roomie Michelle very wisely suggested we paint one wall into a chalkboard a few weeks ago. This came in handy to capture most of our moments from the storm for the first two days.

This morning, my three roommates and I ventured out to find a bus to bring us to any household that would take us with power and most importantly WATER TO TAKE SHOWERS AND FLUSH FLUSH FLUSH. My cousin’s family welcomed me in and I am happy to say my layer of filth has been removed. I also got two cute kids to play with and a dog to cuddle as an extra bonus to this couch-surfing situation.

I feel very fortunate that the scariest part of this storm for me was looking at the scale this morning and discovering how much weight I put on in four days (seriously horrifying). I hope everyone else out here in New York and anyone else effected by the storms is doing well and staying safe.