Do you overreact to the storms?

I've been posting  a lot of rants lately and this is a rant/humorous post. (Or so I am going to try to make it a humorous post...even though I am actually typing this at 1 am.  So most of my humor has gone down the drain.)

As everyone knows, the east coast has been getting hit hard with storms.  Especially the New York metro area.  We have had 3 huge snowfalls to date and some smaller ones in between.  Very unusual for this area during this season.  We may usually see one large storm or even absolutely none.  We haven't had a Winter full of storms like this since 1995/1996.  They have been hyping this storm up for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday up for days now and everyone did their ritualistic mad rush to the grocery store in order to get the essentials.  (Including us! lol)  So today comes and I wake up expecting this huge snowfall.  There wasn't even an inch on the ground.  Sure, the ice wasn't too fun this morning, but it wasn't anything I couldn't handle.  In fact, when I got to work, a lot of people were breathing a sigh of relief because there was no snow.  

The ice was bad enough that people could not walk on unsalted sidewalks and we did see some people slide right in front of work.  When I was driving home I had terrible ice on my side view mirrors and really had to drive home with caution since I couldn't see out of them.  (They really need defrosters on those, by the way!)  


I got home and started working my second job, the girls are playing on my bed, and my mom comes barging in.


"We need to get batteries for the flashlights..."  


Um...ok mom.  There isn't a huge storm, it seems like it passed us, why do we?


"The news is saying that there is going to be a huge ice storm tonight into tomorrow and they're expecting a lot of outages."


Ok mom...do we ever lose power during storms?  

At this point, my mom has begun to scare my girls. They're looking at her like the men in the white jackets should come and take her away.  I'm serious, the girls thought she was crazy.  Alayna even asked if Grandma was ok!

"We need to get ready in case we have a long term outage and need to go to one of the safe areas."


What the hell? Really mom?  So right about then, the girls were freaking about because my mom said they might have to leave here for a few days.  Alayna was running around screaming that she couldn't find her favorite stuffed dog, Olivia ran for her Hide and Seek Jo Jo and I'm sitting here in the midst of this madness shaking my head and trying to find out why my mom is overreacting like this.


Of course, the news hypes this up, as they always do.  Maybe I'm always the 'doubting thomas' until something actually happens, but I read so many conflicting weather reports that I don't know what to believe.  I'm the optimistic one...the eternal optimist.  I never want to believe something until it happens.  I was the one who didn't believe we were getting a blizzard (a few days after Christmas) until I woke up and couldn't open my front door because of the 34 inches of snow outside.   So even in this situation, I'm not going to believe we are having a huge storm with ice and snow tomorrow until I wake  up and see it in the morning.


As a matter of fact, I went to the store right after work tonight to get some things that we needed and some breakfast for myself tomorrow to take to work. (Even though my mom swears up and down that I am not going to go to work tomorrow... Whatever floats her boat!)  


So, in closing, (I know, you're all breathing a sigh of relief that I am almost done)  if it does end up being a huge storm tomorrow I will eat my words.  I will admit that I am still the eternal optimist and I will apologize to my mom for doubting her.  Hell, I'll even call up ABC and apologize for cursing them out while watching my TV.  :D HAHA!!  I just don't feel, with the weather the way it is right this second, that we're going to have that huge storm.