Anyone on the East Coast of the United States knows there was a huge storm system a couple of weeks ago that took out lots of old trees and, subsequently, the power lines in much of the Washington area, and surrounding states.

We were affected at my house, losing power for nearly a full 24 hours, and we were among the lucky ones. This meant trying to sleep on a hot, humid night with no air conditioning, no coffee the next morning and wondering how to re-adjust our Saturday with no power. Sadly, most of the businesses we visit were suffering from the same power outage.

In addition, we were in a bit of shock — we NEVER lose power during these events — whether caused by thunderstorm or snow. Our street is an evacuation route, and we have been fairly well protected, so we really kept expecting the power to come right back on.

Lesson learned. We had a bit of an emergency kit, but after about one hour, we realized we were ill prepared. So did, apparently, much of our surrounding neighborhood, based on the run on D-batteries at local stores. (They were totally sold out at the Target and the CVS.) Lines at gas stations were blocks down the street when folks realized not all stations had power. So, time to get prepped. Not like ‘Doomsday Preppers,’ but reasonably prepared in case a very likely thunderstorm system comes through again, or we will have it ready for the next Snowmageddon.

Step 1 – Check out the Red Cross preparedness lists. These are reasonable targets. Their ‘Be Red Cross Ready’ General Preparedness list looks like a good model to me. State Farm insurance also has some good advice, under Disaster Preparedness.

Step 2 – Make our own readiness plans. We realized we actually have a lot of what we need in the house, but the frustration of having no air conditioning and no access to TV news or the Internet really threw us off.

Step 3 – Go shopping. There are definitely some things missing from our emergency kit, and one of those things is a real ‘KIT.’ Time to take these things seriously.

Here’s my shopping/packing list:

• Hand-crank/solar-powered NOAA radio
• Candles, a lighter and matches.
• Box of easy-burn logs for the fire place. These don’t keep us super warm, but they do help take the chill off when the furnace isn’t working. Hard to prioritize this when it’s 90 degrees outside, but they ought to be cheap right now.
• Bottled water — we have a water filter in our refrigerator, but it’s easy to keep a case of water bottles in the basement.
• Dry goods — cereal/oatmeal for a no-electricity breakfast, canned soup for lunch, other foods with long shelf life we can store for a year or two. Shelf-stable rice milk.
• Contact numbers for family and utilities — these were all on my mobile phone, and my reception died, and so did my phone batteries. That said, we do have a land-line phone that works in our house. Points for that.
• Solar-power cell phone charger (I have this, but it wasn’t where I needed it!)
• Fresh 6-volt battery for our large camping-type flashlight. This is the light we relied on most, and we definitely should have a backup battery for it.
• AA, AAA, C, D batteries – Everyone seems to want them when the power goes out. If we don’t use them, I suppose under dire circumstances we could barter them.

I’d love to get your suggestions and hear your power-out stories. My fingers are crossed that we don’t see another week without power around here this summer. We’ve paid our dues.

Finally made it to the Fillmore in Silver Spring for Danzig – with Doyle –  last night, and it’s still nice and shiny.

If you’re familiar with the 9:30 Club in DC, the Fillmore has a very similar layout – a big open area with two bars where the concert happens, a balcony upstairs which is apparently special access only, then a smaller bar downstairs. The Fillmore is designed to look a bit upscale – there are the legendary screen print posters from the original Fillmore in San Francisco, some crystal chandeliers way the hell up in the rafters, the bathrooms are larger, (I didn’t have to wait in line for the ladies’ room once!) and the bar downstairs has a whole bunch of lava lamps, plus a couple of TVs simulcasting the show upstairs: very handy. The beer also has an upscale price. I paid $18 for two draft beers one point in the evening. Yikes. Good bartenders, though – they kept the bar moving.

The show was good and loud, but there was a good deal of feedback between Danzig’s microphone and the monitor speakers.  He even tossed a monitor off the front of the stage, and complained about the sound guy. We heard feedback from Danzig’s mike all the way through to the encore, and that is darn frustrating for both the artist and the audience.

The security team was on their toes. There were no photos allowed, and I saw at least four folks given stern talking-tos from a duo of security folks, and one guy, brazenly wielding his phone camera towards the end of the show, grabbed and tossed out. There was also a ‘no moshing’ sign, and the security team handled the inevitable crowd-surfers fairly as they rolled over the barricades, one by one.

I really like the fact that Silver Spring has tons of free city parking lots – don’t ever park in a pay lot if you go there. The Cameron Street lot off Georgia Avenue is free after 7pm, and very accessible from the beltway. And of course there is the Metro station, also walkable. There are also dozens of nearby restaurants if you want to make a night of it.

Will we go again? You betcha, even though I will have to take out a loan to buy my beer. It all depends on who’s playing, though – and I doubt Danzig will be back after that feedback fiasco. Fix the sound, Fillmore. Or the musicians will head back to the 9:30 Club.

The National Walk for Epilepsy is next week , and it’s a chance for me to walk with other people, other families, that have been effected by seizures. I am lucky that my seizures can be controlled by medication, but not everyone is so lucky.

There is more research to be done, and more education needs to be done.

• It’s important to understand that some kids have to live with seizures, but they still need to, and CAN go to school.
• It’s important to teach first responders how to react to a seizure.
• It’s important to be sure that health insurance covers seizure medication.
• Medication can be made more predictable, effective and less toxic.
• And the medical community still needs to learn more about why seizures happen and what damage they do to our brains and our bodies.

So, my husband and I will be walking bright and early on a Saturday morning in March, on the National Mall.

I know that children and animals are much more compelling causes than your friend DC Grrl who seems just fine; So, here are some stories about kids and animals. These are the families we’re really walking for:

Andrew, in Fairfax: “Dog that helps epileptic boy will get 2-week tryout at school”

And a great book BY Evan, who wrote this book to help fund his own seizure dog, which I now have in my library. It is AWESOME:
My Seizure Dog

Coming soon: the Concert for Epilepsy this fall, so be on the lookout for more information about that. This guy, possibly the most excellent brother in the world, has been working tirelessly on this project for years, in honor of his little sister who has epilepsy, and this year’s concert should be an amazing event!

Interested in learning more? Here are some places to get some information: Epilepsy Foundation and TalkAboutIt

Sometimes we miss things most when they are gone, and when Tyrone was missing a couple of weeks ago, there was a vacancy in McPherson Square. More than that, there was a cloud over my day, and I got a bit worried.

Every weekday morning he is there to greet me on my way to work. If you take the Metro to McPherson Square, you may know Tyrone, too. Or he may know you. I’m not exactly sure when he showed up, but I think it was during the renovation of the park last year. I was taking photos of the park on a daily (or so) basis, and one day I wasn’t taking a photo, he said,

Aren’t you takin my picture today?

That made me smile, and that wall, which is naturally between strangers, came down a bit.

Tyrone is a beautiful part of my day, which might seem weird because he is a man that sits on a bench all morning. But it’s about attitude. He is careful to greet everyone that goes by, on both sides of 15th Street. He says, “Good morning!” or “Hello precious!” or “Hi there you with the hat over there! I see you!”

He makes sure that all his friends know that he notices them, and everyone that walks by his bench — or within a 50-foot radius of his bench — is a friend of his.

People in the McPherson Square neighborhood also know the man that greets us in the evening, by saying “Quarters, dimes, nickels, dollars, spare change?” He’s been in the area for years.

Remember the man that used to stand outside of the Black Cat on 14th Street and chant “Black Cat, Black Cat!” before the doors opened as we lined up for shows? A friend just mentioned he isn’t there anymore.

Let me be clear, I don’t know all of Tyrone’s story. I am not a social worker. But I talked to him enough to find out that he was away because the heat aggravated his COPD, and he went somewhere for treatment. I’m not sure if he’s homeless or jobless or retired and he just likes to bring his suitcase to the park every day. I am not going to ask you to donate to his cause.

Just remember that these voices we hear on our way to work, on our way to the Metro, or on our way to the nightclub — they have names. This is Tyrone.

I admit it.

I saw that bag sitting there.

I asked around, as intructed by the omni-present WMATA ad campaign, “Is that your bag?” and all nearby Metro riders responded in the negative.

So what next?

The ads say to alert a Metro employee or the police. I’ve got the Metro police phone number plugged into my iPhone. But the train was moving, it was Friday evening, and this was a rarely-seen available seat on the Orange line.

I picked up the bag, carefully set it on the floor, and sat down next to the window. A woman sat next to me, between me and the mystery bag. She had seen the whole thing, yet had no fear.

She didn’t call the a Metro employee or the police.

Thoughts raced through my head:

• I can’t tell my friend who works at Homeland Security I did this.
• I can’t call Metro because I get no reception down here.
• If I call the driver from the call box at the end of the car, it will surely cause a panic and screw up my commute (as well as the Friday night commute for a lot of other people).
• That’s a nice lunch bag. It’s really something that should go in the lost-and-found. Do they have that any more?
• What if I just threw it out a door at a random station, in case it is a bomb?
• I guess if I threw a bomb out of a train I would get arrested at some point…

Luckily it never blew up. I got home safely, though full of guilt.

These Metro ad campaigns have me convinced that every lonely bag should be treated as a suspicious package. But this was not a suspicious package, according to common sense, and according to Metro’s definition. It was a small insulated lunch bag, with room for a drink, and it seemed obvious to me that someone had forgotten it. If it had been truly suspicious I would not have touched it or moved it.

What would you do?

The end of winter is a hopeful time of year. I like seeing the bulbs in my garden breaking through the cold brown earth, promising bright daffodils and crocuses. It also means taxes are due soon, and that is no fun for most people.

But I look forward to the possibility of a nice fat refund, and I enjoy when I can say I’ve stuck to my budget and met my goals, like paying off a credit card or saving for a vacation or something like that. (I really dig Mint.com for personal finance tracking.)

Doing my own budgeting, there are definitely some things I’ve had to cut out in order to pay down my debt, so when I look at the country’s debt, and the struggle for Congress to agree on how our national budget is spent, I sympathize.

Personally, I would rather see federal money spent first on basics:

• Ensure Americans are healthy and educated,
• Facilitate transportation of people and goods across state lines,
• Defend our borders,
• and Provide adequate crisis response.

Federal government agencies are also responsible for protecting our national parks, planning our energy strategies, regulating our prescription drugs and research, and deciding what level of emissions/litter we decide to call pollution. Importantly, the federal government also defends and protects the constitution, using all three branches of government.

We have a lot to accomplish, but we just need to set our priorities straight. And I think it’s important to remember that our government isn’t some crazy militant dictator that’s been sitting in a palace for decades. We have a pretty good system.

• We could have had a lot more money to budget with if the Bush tax cuts hadn’t been extended. What’s up with that?
• Arts programs may have to take a back seat, but, if they do, will citizens who got their tax cuts step in?

I started showing signs that I would be dealing with epilepsy for the rest of my life when I was about 16.

One thing that gave me solace was the song by Joy Division, “She’s Lost Control.”  Ian Curtis, the lead singer of the band, had epilepsy, and wrote the song about a girl having a seizure. It was nice to know someone cool has seizures too.

It’s wasn’t easy back then for me to face the fact that I need pills to make me “normal.” Other people with epilepsy need a lot more than that. Locally, there’s a little boy that’s been fighting to take his service dog with him to school. This boy has to wear a safety helmet as it is, and now he has to fight to take this dog with him to school. It looks like he and his family are winning the fight, but why should they have to fight? And that’s only one family’s story.

When Doug and I went on the National Walk for Epilepsy last year, it was energizing to see how many other stories there are out there. Seizures are confusing and discouraging, but none of us are alone.

There is a lot of research to be done, and many families’ lives would be improved with more knowledge and understanding about seizures. I’ve seen new medications released and information campaigns developed in just the past 20 years, so I have faith that there are even more significant developments to come.

And I’ve got faith in you, my friends and readers… I’m going to be there at the National Walk for Epilepsy again – two months from today – on March 27. We could use your help.

1. Help by LEARNING about epilepsy. Just click over to the Epilepsy Foundation’s website to learn something you didn’t know. That will be priceless.
2. Help by DONATING to make our short walk around the National Mall count more. Click over to my walk page, then click SUPPORT TEAM DC GRRL or MAKE A GIFT.

ALSO SEE: Why I’m walking for epilepsy