Click to view latest update - Tuesday, October 30 at 4:30 PM 

This is it, Hurricane Sandy is upon us. They've been calling this a historic and massive storm, and to not be fooled by its category 1 classification. We're starting to see what this is all about as the rain has begun falling at a steady pace as Sandy, still substantially offshore by hundreds of miles, begins to interact with another storm system coming across the country. I just think it's a little bit funny that this hurricane of epic proportions bears the same name as my mother-in-law.

We'll be keeping tabs on Sandy throughout the day and will update you throughout the day with additions to this post.

Real Time Reporting

Here's a live look at Sandy out our front window. I'm most worried about the several very large trees along the sidewalks as the wind begins to pick up. This image will update automatically every few seconds.

Personally, I have to eat my words a bit. Last week, on Tuesday or Wednesday, a coworker said "Looks like we're gong to get hit by a hurricane." I responded incredulously, "It's too cold to hit up north and it will probably go out to sea!" Boy was I wrong. 

As we all began to realize that this hurricane is more or less imminent, Frankenstorm preparations started in earnest over the weekend around the area. Most utilized an absolutely picture perfect fall day to do a bit of shopping and stocking up. We headed out on Saturday to pick up some necessary food and supplies from the farmer's market and our local Safeway. We found the grocery store shelves to still be largely stocked, though there were some exceptions. The batteries had already been picked over with all of the D cells wiped clean from the display...

...and the absolute essentials were already quite picked over, as only a few six packs of beer remained.

Yesterday we noticed quite a bit more prep around the area. The Papyrus store on King Street went to extra lengths and actually boarded up all of the windows. This is actually the only store we saw on the main thoroughfare in our town that had gone to these extremes.

Down near the flood-prone areas of Old Town, the city was filling and giving away sand bags to residents looking to shore up their homes from a potentially rising Potomac River.

I snapped a quick before photo of lower King Street, which I fully expect to be flooded with both news crews as well as water.