Hurricane Preparedness Checklist

There are those who say you can never be truly prepared for a hurricane. They say this not because it’s true, but because they’d like to interest you in insurance. All you really need to have to be prepared for a hurricane is a checklist. Preferably, it would be a hurricane preparedness checklist. Fortunately, I have constructed a hurricane preparedness checklist that you can print out and laminate so that you can read it when the hurricane starts.

• Have you told your mother that you love her? Don’t. That will make her think the end is near, when the reality is the end is just nearby. It’s best to just send her a text reading, “Everything is fine. I have always wanted my own seahorse.” That will let her know that you’re fine and are willing to make the most of a bad and/or underwater situation.

• Have you suspended your newspaper home delivery? You’ll want to resume it to ensure you’re able to keep abreast of news during the hurricane. If the newspaper arrives and is wet, the effects of the hurricane are still being felt, and it’s best to stay indoors. If the newspaper stops arriving, you may take this as a possible indicator that news, democracy, and freedom of speech have all been suspended and replaced with martial law by jet ski-riding warlords. If you have a jet ski, you can probably assume a role in the new government.

• Have you stocked up on canned goods and water? If so, you are already doing far too much. There’s going to be plenty of water so why are you devoting valuable storage space to it? Aquariums would be a much better use of that space. You will be able to use them to contain much of the water and marine life that will soon be sharing your living quarters with you.

• Have you placed your dishes, laundry, or old relatives outside? The hurricane represents an opportunity to clean these items in an ecologically sound manner. You will need to secure your dishes, laundry, and old people firmly to the ground and be sure to retrieve them quickly after the storm before they’re stolen. Police are notoriously loathe to track down these things because of their generally low resale value.

• Have you built an ark? If you haven’t built one yet, there’s no use trying now. The best you can hope for is having a neighbor willing to give you a lift. Be prepared to endure several days of snide mumbling about grasshoppers and ants (you’re the ant).

Please be safe during the hurricane. A lot of myths about hurricanes have been spread by the hurricane industry, a group of professionals devoted to promoting hurricanes and rain coats. Here are some of the most common myths regarding hurricanes.

• MYTH! You can stop a hurricane by gathering a group of friends together and blowing opposite the direction of the hurricane’s winds. FACT: It’s too difficult to get enough of your friends on the same page about anything no matter how many Facebook Invites you send out.

• MYTH! Everything is calm in the eye of the hurricane. FACT: I am not calm in the eye of the hurricane.

• MYTH! You can catch raindrops on your tongue during a hurricane. FACT: It’s far too difficult to catch anything on your tongue when you’re flying backwards.

• MYTH! Hurricanes spin the other way in the other hemisphere. FACT: The other hemisphere doesn’t have hurricanes. It pretends to to keep us from feeling bad about ourselves. If it did have hurricanes, they’d spin the same way: quickly.