Wednesday, December 12, 2007

No lights, no heat, but a lot of fun....

It's been an interesting couple of days out here in the Midwest US. Ice began flying on Monday early evening and didn't stop until sometime Tuesday mid-morning, only to start up again on Tuesday night. We lost power at our house at about 5:00 Tuesday morning and decided to "hole up" for the day. We were grateful to have our power restored at about 3:30 Tuesday afternoon, but that only lasted for a couple of hours....

So, Tuesday night we moved a large mattress into our bedroom and put the kids down on it. We shut everything up and managed to stay pretty warm in the bedroom even though the temperature dropped below 20 degrees overnight. When we woke up this morning our room was still fairly comfortable, but the rest of the house had dropped down below 50 degrees and was steadily dropping. Listening to the radio we discovered that there was no power anywhere in town, so we went to the Red Cross shelter so we could get a warm cup of coffee and try to find out some information from the folks there. As soon as we got there the Red Cross representative asked us if we wanted to get cots reserved for the five of us since power wasn't expected to be restored for at least 2 days! We got the cots, came home and got bedding, and headed back to the shelter to ride the rest of this thing out.

We spent about 3 hours at the shelter mingling with the folks, eating lunch, and watching "Cars" when suddenly, the lights came on! The problem turned out to be a tad less major than the power company had assumed and they were able to get power restored to a large part of the city...as it turned out, our house was part of that section (although, not everyone in our neighborhood has power just yet).

So, we're back home where it's warm and cozy and I'm sitting here drinking coffee out of my favorite coffee cup. Rarely has a shower and shave felt as good as they did this evening! The kids are a tad disappointed that we didn't get to sleep on the cots at the shelter, but when they found out that school was canceled tomorrow (for the 3rd consecutive day), they kind of forgot about missing out on the adventure of sleeping on cots with a couple of hundred other people!

The entire town is a mess right now. Enough ice dropped that a lot of power lines and a few poles broke. There are trees down all over town and several of the trees in our backyard sustained some pretty major damage. Thankfully, we haven't heard about there being any injuries or deaths due to the storm. Some of the clean up began today, but we've all got a heck of a long week ahead of us. Tonight it's supposed to drop down to 18 degrees or so, but it doesn't like there going to be much moisture in the air, so we shouldn't have any problems overnight.

I'll try to post some pictures of the damage to our property later this week...

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