Year Without A Halloween Redux

I'm gearing up for the second year in a row where I celebrated Halloween by tossing out the food in my fridge and freezer after a multi-day power outage made it all rot. I've been a lose-electricity bad-weather magnet these past thirteen months: Hurricane Irene and the pre-Halloween snowstorm in Connecticut, then I moved to northern Virginia a week before the derecho hit it this June, and now Hurricane Sandy is slated to rendezvous with a Midwestern storm and an Arctic cold-air mass to create another "Perfect Storm" like the one which inspired that movie I never bothered to watch.

After last year's Halloween storm I went for six days (and six below-freezing nights) without electricity, but heated my apartment by making space heaters out of empty steel coffee cans and metal-cup tealight candles. This year, I'm even better prepared than last time: my emergency kit includes seven empty coffee cans and over 1,500 tealight candles (most in hundred-count boxes bought for four bucks apiece). I've also topped off my car's gas tank, and have all my emergency supplies plus the batteries to power them grouped on or under the patio table, which is now in the living room. My neighborhood will most likely be well to the southwest of Sandy's eye, which I'm pretty sure is where the weakest winds of a storm blow, and my neighborhood appears to be high elevation compared to its surroundings, thus not particularly prone to flooding. But I'll probably lose power and Internet for at least a day or two, if not longer.