It's back on!!!!!!

After 9 days our electricity is back on.

Thank goodness. 

Did you hear us yelling from happiness?

Appreciating.

Today, my youngest son was cold inside the house, but the temperature was 68 degrees, which is what we usually keep it on when we have electricity. He decided to go outside, get really cold, then he could come back in, the better to appreciate the warmth. That's kind of what I did with my job situation. I had a good job but was unappreciative of it, so I took the other one and now I'm back where I was, but now I realize what I've got.

Day 8.

Still no power.  It got down to 51 degrees in our house this morning, which doesn't seem cold if it's a spring day and you are completely dressed and out taking a hike, but in the bedroom, when you first wake up, it's cold. 

We're trying to do school this week, but honestly, not doing very well.  I've got a lot of extra work to keep the house going, heating water for dishes and baths, etc. and it seems like that's about all I get done but we're still plugging away at it.  There has been some whining, not all of it from the kids.

About work yesterday.

I went to work yesterday at the hospital. I have given my 2 weeks notice and my 2 weeks is up on Friday. So yesterday was one of my regularly scheduled days and I showed up to work and one of the at-home transcriptionists was there at my workstation working. It's the only workstation that there is at the hospital for transcription, so they didn't need me and didn't bother to call and tell me not to come in. Very annoying. I really think I'm doing a good thing by leaving this job.

A week.

It will be a week at about 7:00 p.m. tonight that we've been without electricity.  The generator is worth it's weight in gold.  Yesterday, my oldest son and I ventured out to the laundromat and washed 4 loads of laundry.  That's expensive and interesting.  It's only the second time I've been to the laundromat in my life, that's how spoiled I am.  I talked to a lot of people up there who were in the same boat as us, looking at a week of no power.  Still, in the grand scheme of things, this isn't so bad.  It's inconvenient and expensive, but it's not life threatening or heartbreaking.  One of my fellow bloggers is dealing with losing her father this week.  She's on my mind today.  http://lottakids1961.blogspot.com/  

We're doing work and school today and trying to live normally despite the small inconveniences and the fact that our feet haven't been really warm for a week. 

More of a pain now.

We're without power still. It's actually more of a pain right now than it was last week, because I have to go to work and we can actually get out so we've had a lot of things to do, only to return home to our house, which is only functioning at about 40%. Maybe not that much. We have a hot plate that I can cook on with the generator, but it doesn't work very well. I can cook on the kerosene heater if it is cold enough outside to run the heater. Same thing with heating water for a bath. It's just really getting old. My parents are still living with my brother and it's getting very old for them too.

Camping in notes and pictures. (Hopefully).

I'm hooked up to the generator now.  I needed to connect my laptop up to it so I could update for work tonight, so I thought I might as well blog.  I must be missing the first couple of pages of my camping in diary because the first entry I see is labeled “48 Hours In”. I thought I was writing a lot of good stuff, but when I went back to look at it, it wasn’t all that profound, just day to day details. Anyway, here’s a summary.

This is a picture of our deck, with a tree lying over on it and our outdoor table and chairs, which are kind of toast now. 

The first couple of days, our concerns were getting out of our driveway, keeping warm, and making sure our families were warm and safe (tons of phone calls) . I’m not sure what we could have done if they weren’t. If my brother hadn’t come in from out of state to get my parents and take them to his house, we might have had to get the police or someone to give them a ride! During this time, we got the 2 ½ trees cleared out of our driveway, the kerosene heater started and our lanterns set up. We read a lot and played a lot of board games. Fortunately, our board game cabinet selection is extensive.

So by Thursday, 48 hours in, my husband had to return to work. My boss from the hospital called to see if I’d work Friday, but the only way I was getting in there was if my husband drove me in the truck and he wasn’t willing to do that after sleeping about 20 minutes and then working a 10 hour overnight shift. Apparently, the hospital was over capacity with a lot of people admitted for carbon monoxide poisoning. One of the other MTs was MIA and they really needed me, but there was no way my van was going in there and you have to be used to the brakes on my husband’s truck to drive it, even on good roads.

I didn’t want to go back to work. I was kind of enjoying the pioneering, cooking over the stove, finding creative ways to entertain ourselves, reading a book about people trapped in a snowstorm. We played Farkle, Racko, The Game of Life, Clue, Apples to Apples, Cranium, Zeus on the Loose, Uno, Outburst, Password, Chinese Checkers, Fluxx and Mad Libs. The funniest Mad Libs we did was one night when we had one about a cruise ship and the phrase turned out to be “our chefs will prepare wonderful pickled desserts that will melt in your pants”. and then when I was reading them, I was supposed to day look at your waxy face and I said “look at your waxy adjective face” (I read the word underneath waxy!) Anyway, I was tired, that’s my excuse. It was so funny. About midnight after your power has been off for 3 or 4 days, everything is just so much funnier. It’s because you start to get hysterical.

It was weird walking outside. I could hear the neighbor’s generators running. Our ‘fridge” was outside now so we had to go out quite often for milk and stuff. It’s good to open your doors a lot to let fresh air in when you’re heating with kerosene. I don’t like the smell of it, but I like being warm, so I dealt with it. I finally did go back to work on Saturday. Our power came back on for part of Saturday and I got to take a nice hot shower before heading in. It went back off again after I got home …

Maybe it will come back on again soon, but the generator makes life more normal anyway. I can work this evening and maybe the kids can have screen time. We didn’t do any school this week. We should have, but we just didn’t. I think they learn things from experiences like this. I know I do.

It's back off.

Our power was on for 14 hours, then went off again. No idea why. At least we have the generator going now.