With Hurricane Fiona bearing down on us, we picked two of the last three sets of walkie-talkies on the shelf at Canadian Tire yesterday, as a backup Brighton-Downtown-Stratford communications system, should cell service go down.

They are Cobra AXCT1035RFLT, and they are not the walkie-talkies of my youth (which had a range of “Mike’s bedroom to my bedroom”).

That said, the advertised 37 mile range is under optimum conditions—Great Salt Lake, perhaps?

My house is about a mile across town from Lisa’s and there’s a lot of downtown infrastructure between us. From our experiments yesterday it seems like we’re on the edge of “urban usage” range. We’re going to test the Stratford link this afternoon, which I’ve greater hopes for, as it’s almost line-of-site across the water.

We’ve spent the last 24 hours clearing out our yards, stowing projectile-possible things and lashing what can’t be stowed.

I started to write that this is the first big “there’s nothing you can do, and nowhere to run” thing that’s come along since Catherine died. But then I remembered, well, COVID. All the same, it is unusual to be in anxiety-sync with everyone else around me, perhaps more noticeably because the early stages of COVID anxiety were from lockdown, so I didn’t bump up against a lot of others in the same state: this week the collective anxiety in the grocery store, on the roads, in the air, has been palpable.