Consider these options for entertainment during our next storm.
1. Tell your visiting mother-in-law from Michigan to take refuge in the safest place in the house: the upstairs sunroom.
2. Using a mop, take turns with other family members rotating the ceiling fan. Feel the breeze?
3. Go to your neighbor’s house and open their refrigerator to cool down the house.
4. Convince your niece she can nurse her dolls with the melted ice cream.
5. Prick your husband’s finger and make him write in blood, “I promise to buy a gas stove.”
6. Need to feel productive? Crunch a bag of potato chips. Scatter them across the carpet. Pick up pieces by hand. Repeat if desired.
7. When the power goes out, pretend you’re Lestat and run around tasting your family’s necks.
8. Go to the Spring Hill Delchamps and complain they’re out of brie and batteries.
9. Avoid the rush: At the first posting of a hurricane warning call Sound-Off with your philosophy that the hurricane is our punishment for the gambling aspect of church cakewalks.
10. Hang out in front of Home Depot and wait for the news cameras to show up.
11. Go into Denny’s and tell the group from Illinois that there’s a jubilee going on in Fairhope.
12. In the dim candlelight of the bathroom, substitute a tube of Preparation H for the toothpaste.
13. While you’re at it, switch out Tucks for the moist towelettes.
14. Use your vibrating beeper to make a Ouija hurricane tracking chart.
15. During the eye of the hurricane, take a bike ride to the Grand Hotel and feed those poor frightened ducks.
16. Show up at the Baker High School hurricane shelter carrying a can of Spam and a piece of poster board reading, “The end is near.”
17. Using an empty toilet paper tube as a makeshift microphone, pretend you are Jason Barry and assign family members the role of Dauphin Island evacuees. Conduct numerous interviews. Use key phrases such as, “I looked up and saw that pine tree headed for the house and yelled, “Honey, get the kids up under the El Camino!”
18. Show up at a previously scheduled dinner party in your cocktail attire. Act offended that no food has been prepared and that the host and hostess are wearing sweats.
19. Stand in your front yard watering the lawn, blithely waving at evacuees hurrying past in their cars.
20. Call Alabama Power every 5 minutes complaining that you’re still without power.
21. Take a bubble bath in the tub filled with emergency water.
22. Whip up two gallons of pistachio pudding using the quickly spoiling milk.
23. Frantically stir the water in your aquarium with a teaspoon since the aerator isn’t working.
24. Refuse to evacuate your favorite fishin’ spot along the Causeway until Channel 10 arrives to interview you.
25. Take a break from charades. Try a game of family Twister.
26. Annoy your spouse by continually forgetting that the microwave doesn’t work when the power’s out.
27. Re-live your glory days in the army: after the hurricane, don your drabs, circa 1967, and patrol the bay searching for unfortunate victims.
