Who Turned Out the Lights

This week has been crazy! It all started last Sunday when we had the high wind storm hit our area. This was from hurricane Ike. I live in Ohio and we are so far away and yet winds were clocked around here at 72 miles per hour. It was an all day crazy wind storm. I couldn’t imagine what it was like for everyone in Texas.

We had a huge old tree in our yard split down the middle. It landed right on top of my husband’s car. Now most people would be upset by this event but I wasn’t. Wooh-hoo…I was celebrating because the car now has to go.

This is an old car that my husband can’t seem to part with. It sits in our driveway collecting dirt and dust and rarely gets driven. I hate this car sitting in the drive way, paying insurance on it and putting new tags on it each year. I probably should have showed more sympathy over the crushed car but I didn’t. He knows I am happy about it.

Power is now out all over the place and we are part of this outage. Of course Monday morning I get up for work not sure if we are going to have power in the office or not. Just my darn luck we do and my son’s daycare also with power so I couldn’t use him as an excuse to stay home. OK, maybe staying home wouldn’t have been fun with out all the creature comforts we are use to but I could have slept in and had a nap that day. That always sounds good to me….

Tuesday night they teased us with about 3 hours of power between 11:30 and 2:30 that night. This didn’t do much good since we were all sleeping. I almost took a shower at 2:30 when I woke up but didn’t and was so mad the next morning when the power was gone again.

Fast forward to Thursday and we still have no power. For us this is even worse because our house is on a well so when the power is out so is the water because the pump stops working. I can deal with no lights, TV, etc.. but not having water is horrible.

Finally Thursday night the power kicks on at 6:30. Time to celebrate…. Yeah right!

What do you think the first thing I did when the power came on? I grab my vacuum cleaner and start sweeping the house like a mad woman. I think I have a little OCD when it comes to vacuuming. I continue cleaning the evening away. I also bathed two kids and took a shower myself because I was not missing that opportunity again.

That night I think I ran every noisy thing I could from radios to TV’s and worked the lights a lot. I also turned the water on and ran it just to here it run.

I have a new appreciation for these things. When they are not there everything becomes twice as difficult. We went 5 days with out power and water. Have you ever gone for any stretch of time with out power or water? How long? What crazy things did you have to do to function normally?