As I sit here with my French-pressed morning coffee, I look across our little neighborhood pond and I’m thankful for an ordinary dawn. My wife, my sons, and I have now been in our new home roughly a month, and during that month, we have had the unique opportunity to survive Hurricane Irma.

Predictions were all over the place, but as it turned out, our new home near Tampa was spared the brunt of the storm. Instead, it turned east, striking my former city of residence with an angry ferocity not seen since Hurricane Donna. My previous home was undamaged as well, fortunately, and all my central Florida family members weathered the event without much ado: a few branches were downed, foliage was blown all over the place, but their homes and their lives were spared. We are grateful.

Our new home lost power for about two days, and we all became reintroduced to such preservative-laden delicacies as Vienna sausage, which, for the uninitiated, is essentially the leftover parts of varying animals rolled into a slick, flesh-colored casing and stuffed into a tiny can. It is, perhaps, the closest thing to Soylent Green that I’ll ever eat.

Without power, the grill became our friend as well, barbecuing the wholesale-club sleeves of burgers we had frozen for a large family dinner. No freezer meant that all that cow was going to go bad, so it was charcoal to the rescue. I felt sort of bad grilling all that delicious ground beef because I have Hindu neighbors. There they were: no electricity, and having to smell the meaty (offensive?) aroma of medium-well survival patties. What’s an old country boy to do?

At last, power has been restored, life has returned to normal, and I’m once again able to enjoy the first-world luxuries of air conditioning, hot water, and a civilized kitchen. Our little foray into apocalyptic living is over, for now. But as Jose churns in the Atlantic, I think I’ll see if Sam’s has mega-packs of veggie burgers, just in case.