February???

Seriously?? I can hardly believe we are well into 2012. January was a very interesting month!

We started getting snow Sunday, January 15. By Thursday we had 14 inches on the ground; some of my friends had 28!! Wednesday the snow was so deep that Leroy didn’t even try to go to work. Neither did anyone else – they were all sledding on the greenbelt behind our house.

Then the freezing rain started – and after 24 hours of it, trees started falling, electrical lines were breaking, and we watched transformers blow across the horizon. We don’t have any trees on our property, so we didn’t know the extent of the damage that was occurring because of the ice.

Can you see the ice sheen on the snow?

We rarely lose power in our area so I wasn’t too worried. But as we started having brown outs all morning, Thursday, February 19th, I started finding flashlights and talking to the kids about what we will do if the power goes out. It went out a couple of times and we ran around unplugging everything.

12:45 – OUT. Phone too! I was thankful for our gas fireplace and gas stove!! We cooked dinner and ate by hanging flashlights off the dining room fixture.

We played games by firelight – boy – that was FUN!

It really was fun. The kids moved into our room and we were all asleep by 10 – wow. That was NICE!

The next morning, Leroy went to work (they never lost power). But I had a decision to make. The other 3 directors of my homeschool community and I had a planning weekend on the books for months – and we were supposed to leave that afternoon. After much discussion between all of us and our husbands, we decided to go. Leroy took the kids with him to work and I left for Ocean Shores. One of our directors had time share there; we got the penthouse to spend the night and day planning for our community. It was hard to be there knowing what the family was experiencing at home…

Leroy spent the day with the kids at Jumping Jacks where they did have power. I got home last Saturday night and we got power back at Midnight – a total of 60 hours without power. But there were quite a few people who were out for a full week.

There is still snow around where they had plowed the parking lots and streets and you can see all the broken trees and shrubs – it is quiet the scene around town.

A little scary to think of how little we are prepared for a real emergency. Gas, food stock, heat… we need to think about that kind of stuff…