On Going Preparations For Hurricane Irene

Today we made the decision to ride this hurricane out within our home.
This decision was a tough one and was based on many different factors. Because we live next to a Bay rather than the actual Sound, the chance of flooding in our immediate area is minimal. This left our decision mainly based on the wind factor.
This hurricane is supposed to be a category 3 or possibly a category 2 when it makes landfall in our general area.
I ended up getting what they call "hurricane tape" to put on the windows on top of the other 5 layers of shipping tape that I had put on yesterday.
This so called "hurricane tape" looks like nothing more that beefed up glorified duct tape. It is supposed to be stronger than duct tape and hopefully will help our windows from shattering or getting blown in during the storm.
I also put this hurricane tape on some other windows that I had not put shipping tape on yesterday.
Now 90% of the windows have tape on them and the other 10% are either small windows or windows that are to far out of reach for me to do them.
Because many stores are closing down for the duration of the storm tonight, we decided to make a last minute run to a local convenience store and we purchased 80 pound of ice.
The storm won't be here until Saturday evening but since most stores will be closed tomorrow, I felt that we needed to get the ice tonight rather than go searching around for a store that was open.
We have 3 rather large coolers of which 2 are just about new.
We filled the bottom of each cooler with soda pop and then put the ice on top. At least if the electricity goes out, we won't have to open and close the fridge in order to get a cold drink. I am hoping that the electric stays on but my gut is telling me that it won't.
We will be setting up "Command Central" down in the ground level floor interior bathroom.
We have basically packed up the fiberglass shower area with anything that we would consider valuable to us.
We have a couple of fans that run on either batteries or electricity. I think they are made for campers but they have worked great for us when we have either the a/c or the heat on and we place them right over the floor register so that they push the cold or warm air up into the room. They really help to keep the room at the temperature that we are trying to attain.
These 2 fans will be brought downstairs and used in "Command Central" should the electricity go out. If it does go out and we have no a/c, it will get really hot really quick in our place.
I will probably fix up some type of sleeping area in that interior bathroom.
It is a rather small bathroom but we will do what we have to to ride the storm out as comfortably as possible.
While I am doing my finishing touches to our emergency preparedness plans, Veronica will be at the store getting it ready to close for the duration of this storm and until the storm passes.
For the most part we have done all we can to prep our home for this upcoming hurricane.
So unless something drastic happens, we will be staying put and experiencing this storm as it actually occurs rather than seeing it transpire on the television.
I will continue to update throughout the course of this weather event.