November 6, 2011

Towards the beginning of the movie Armageddon, a civilian spots the meteor with his telescope and calls it in. After giving the coordinates, it goes a little something like this:

Is it true that whoever finds it gets to name it?
Yes
Well then I want to name it Dottie, after my wife. She's a vicious life-sucking bitch from which there is no escape.

The storm that hit us last weekend was Storm Alfred, and no, I wasn't the one who named it.

When the snow started, it was beautiful. The first snow always is. Big wet flakes.

We lost power Saturday just as we were warming up dinner. We spent the evening playing charades and rhyming games and whatever we could think of that would keep everyone entertained for a few hours. We watched parts of trees falling in the yard through various windows. We attempted to put each kid to bed in their own room, but that resulted in a lot of tears. So I kept Jesse and Jocelyn in my bed and Josh went and bunked with Timothy.

It was so strange falling asleep in extreme quiet, listening to trees crack and break and fall.

When I woke up on Sunday, Jocelyn and Jesse were at the bedroom window looking out. "That's a BIG TREE!"

And they were right - there was a great big tree lying across our driveway. We were trapped. There was about 6-8 inches of snow on the ground and parts of trees everywhere, but one full tree up by the roots that had quite fortunately not hit the garage.

Luckily Joey was able to get out of his place and he went to Lowe's and got us a hand saw and a gas chain saw. When he stopped to get gas, he discovered that since many many gas stations had no power, the ones that were left required a several hour wait. So he brought us the saw and we managed to use it to saw off enough branches so that we could drive under the tree and get the cars in and out. Yay!

We walked around the neighborhood to see how bad it was. Pretty bad - trees down everywhere. Our street has underground wires, so our power outage wasn't from us, and we could only assume that the rest of the town looked at bad. One of our neighbor's trees had split in 3 and peeled like a banana. Another neighbor was shoveling his driveway in his motorcycle helmet because parts of trees were continuing to fall.

By Sunday evening it was getting chilly in the house. We have a fireplace in our bedroom that we've never used, along with birch logs that came with the house, and more birch logs in the fireplace in my office. So 3 short hours later and we had a fire going. That's a bit of a skill isn't it! So we all sat in the dark in front of the fire and I told the kids stories of when they were little and they told us stories of things they remembered when they were little and then started just making up random stories about farts and stuff. The little ones said it was the best night of their lives. We repeated the same sleeping arrangements as the night before. We got a blast email from the school that school was canceled for Monday and Tuesday and Halloween was also canceled.

Monday morning I got up in the dark and braced myself for a cold shower. Thankfully, the water was still fairly warm, and while my shower was not real pleasant, it wasn't painful, and that was fine. I mistakenly drove over some downed wires on the way to work while I was trying not to drive into trees jetting out from the side of the road. The lines that were up had branches hanging from them. The main light onto the highway was out and no one was directing traffic, but everyone was generally being polite.

It was weird to go to work. I felt like I should be home doing... something. With no power in 70% of the state and schools and day cares out everywhere, a lot of people brought their kids into Aetna for a shower and some hot food.

In the garage, Josh hooked up the propane burner that he uses to make beer, and we used it for hot water and food, so we ate pretty well all week, though he still lost nearly 10 pounds. I haven't wanted to take my clothes off long enough to weigh myself.

It was even colder Tuesday, and the fairly warm water in the shower was only somewhat warm. Tuesday night Jocelyn wasn't feeling well and we loaded her up on medicines that Josh went out to fetch, but she woke up crying every 2 hours, saying that her ear hurt. In between one of her awakenings, I woke up smelling smoke and turned out the flue had slammed shut and Josh was trying to air out the room before we all choked to death (Josh waited up with the fire each night while we got a few hours of warmER sleep). We got a blast email that school was canceled the rest of the week.

So Wednesday morning was not fun. The shower was down to tepid, and I was very worried about Jocelyn. Rumor at work was that the wait time at the local MinuteClinics was about 2 hours. Everyone at work was about as punchy as I was, seeing as there had been virtually no improvement in the proportion of people without power, and anyone with power had relatives staying with them. No one was sleeping. The stop lights were still out all over the place and even my typically quite tolerable commute was nearly doubled. I considered having Josh bring Jocelyn into work to see if the Wellness Center at work had someone who would see her, but finally Josh emailed that Jocelyn had had a 3 hour nap and woke up saying her ear didn't hurt, it only felt like "a microphone".

So Wednesday night, while down to the mid to upper-40s in the house, was better. We sat around the fire yet again (getting pretty skilled at it by now!), minus Timothy (whose girlfriend still had power) and told more stories and then Josh and I tucked the little ones into our bed and we broke out the portable DVD player (that I'd been dragging to work each day to charge, along with alternating the laptops) and watched a couple episodes of Roseanne, and almost felt normal for a few minutes.

Thursday morning was the last of the nearly tepid water, and when I stepped into the garage, I realized it was warmer outside than in.

South Windsor had been only 73% out of power until Thursday, when it jumped to 91% out of power. Places that had been lit up on the way to work were now out, as were the highway lights until I got to East Hartford. But the traffic lights were on, so go figure. Each day I spent the day thinking I should be at home, but of course the entire company would likely come crashing down without me. LOL, ok, maybe that's an overstatement, but I had stuff to do.

Thursday we got our first actual information about potential power restoration via a facebook update from our state senator that there were crews in the town and that the substation was out and that the transistors that had not been out were now out, I assume from stress. Thursday evening I saw the first utility trucks I had seen all week.

Until then really the only updates I had were from NPR as I listened each night on my commute home to journalists fire questions at our governor and the head of the utility company, but none of this seemed to result in much progress as even on Thursday 60% of the state was still out of power.

I was off on Friday as it was supposed to be Jesse's birthday. We took a drove over to the substation but didn't see much action happening there. We drove by BounceTown and that was dark, so I sent an email to Jesse's class saying his party was canceled. We picked up more wood for the fireplace, then went home, packed some dirty laundry and pajamas up, and headed to mom and dad's for the night, where we all got clean and washed our clothes and watched some TV.

And then I remembered why we don't share a room with Morgan - he got up at 1:30am! So I didn't get a whole lot of sleep, though everyone else managed to sleep through Morgan being up. I was bunking with Jocelyn on the futon and Josh was with Jesse on the air mattress, so I had to get out of bed to walk over and shake Josh to get him to stop snoring.

Other than sleeping we had a great visit and the kids had a wonderful time playing video games and watching TV. I obsessively hit refresh on the website that tracked what % of each town was still out of power. South Windsor kept moving back and forth but finally started getting lower instead of higher so we headed home around 2pm.

As we were driving up to the house, we were examining the rest of the houses in the neighborhood and started seeing some porch lights on. When we came up to our own house - the lights were on! The garage door opened! We went inside - it was warming up!

We wandered around, not really sure what to do. It smelled funny. Like something burning. Where was that coming from? We started sniffing and walking. OMG - we were warming up chili when this all started and the burner was still on! And last night's spaghetti was on it! Luckily it wasn't even burned yet - good thing we came home when we did!

Then we continued wandering around not knowing what to do. I stood in the toy room and just looked out the window and cried. This was a loooong week, but we made it!

This morning we broke out the chain saw and tried to get the tree off our driveway, but it's just too big. So we put our name on the list at a tree service and they say they can be here in 8-10 days. Not too bad. Meanwhile we'll put the chain saw to work on the back yard, which is covered in very large branches and tree tops.

8% of the state is still out of power, and 32% of South Windsor. The outage is concentrated to the NE and NW of Hartford, but not in Hartford itself. The utility company said it would be only 1% by midnight tonight. They better hurry up! Yesterday on our way home we finally saw trucks working - from Denver. There are apparently crews from all over the country here helping out, though it took many days for the utility company to get them here, perhaps because they still haven't paid all their bills from Irene, which also left parts of the state without power for over a week.

And it's not even snow season yet!

So that was our week - hope everyone else had a better week than we did! But we're alright now :)

Rhonda