Continuing the Journey

The Pioneer Life is NOT the Life For Me!!

Saturday, we attended our first Autumn Moon Festival (a traditional Chinese festival). However, that event deserves a post of its own. Before getting to that, gotta post about the excitement we had on Sunday!

As I was lying down to take my traditional Sunday after-Church nap and Kevin was preparing a grocery list, it started to get REALLY windy outside. Now, typically, I love to nap through bad weather...feeling all snug inside my house. These winds, however, were different.

Just after I fell asleep, Kevin came up to the bedroom and told me the power was out and he had to go pick Meggie up at dance. The wind sounded WICKED outside! I went downstairs to help him get out of the garage (since our electric garage door wasn't quite working). When I looked out our kitchen window, this is what I saw:
That would be our neighbors' trampoline, turned upside-down by the wind. I have to admit (sorry, Alan and Julie!) that I chuckled a bit. It didn't look damaged and it WAS a sight to see. God must have been listening. While Kevin was out getting Meggie and some of her friends safely home from dance, I watched as the wind got worse and worse. I saw our trampoline roll a bit across our yard...but then it went FLYING and ended up here...
...on top of Alan and Julie's trampoline! Alan was sweet enough to run out and tie our trampoline and his to their swingset with his garden hose (good thinking, McGyver!) so they wouldn't go flying any further.

When Daddy and the kids arrived home, he headed out to help. Meggie and Morgan (whose parents weren't home, so Meggie was afraid to leave her home alone) ran out at my suggestion and tied our patio furniture together with our garden hose. I'm sure that saved a LOT of damage from flying chairs!
Another neighbor's trampoline started rolling...since a bunch of our neighbors were outside, they grabbed the trampoline and tied it to a swingset as well.
I like to call this picture the "Meeting of the Minds." The winds were still howling and the men were strategizing what to do next. Uhhh...maybe you all oughta get your hard heads INDOORS before somebody gets hurt!!
When Meggie and Morgan ran back inside after securing the patio furniture, Carson was disgusted to see all the leaves that blew in with them. Here he is, showing me the offensive evidence:
Since Daddy was outside "playing," Carson was chomping at the bit to join him. I was NOT going to let my Little Man get hurt in that wind, so we opted to pull our chairs up to the kitchen windows and watch the action from the safety of the house.
The reports on our battery-powered radio told us we were enduring hurricane winds! In the Midwest, thousands of miles from any ocean, we were suffering through the equivalent of a Category One hurricane without the rain. Too weird!

My sister, Debbie, and Baby Sophia were at our house (we had babysat Sophia while Debbie walked in the Breast Cancer walk-a-thon Sunday morning and they were preparing to leave when the storm hit) and we were bored. So I braved the dark basement (with only the Cars flashlight and the Giggling Hippo flashlight as protection) to find us something to do...
...while Sophia happily jumped in her bouncer, completely oblivious to the dangers outside.
Success!! A Scrabble tournament ensued...Debbie was VERY proud to announce that she FINALLY beat me at Scrabble (by four stinkin' points, but it made her awfully happy)!
Meggie and Morgan were more bored than we were and decided to lounge on the deck after the winds died down. The blankets were required because the winds brought a nice cool front and the temp dropped about 25 degrees in the matter of an hour!
Monday morning, the men were again out in force, dragging everyone's trampolines/siding/etc. from all over the neighborhood to their rightful owners. We were trapped in our subdivision for the morning, having heard reports on our battery-powered radio that power lines were down on the main road just outside our neighborhood. Sadly, the trampoline "took one for the team" and had to be put down...
...poor Carson was devastated to see the remains of the poles after Daddy took the trampoline apart. "Daddy BROKED it!" he kept shouting.
Since I had planned on doing laundry on Sunday...a LOT of laundry...the power outage left quite a few piles to haunt me!I tried to air dry the load of towels that I had washed (but that had not made it to the dryer before the power went out)...they were so heavy that I had to prop both sides of my drying rack with stools so it wouldn't crumble under the weight!As far as laundry went, we really were OK on clothes. OK, so we weren't going to win any style contests, but we had clean things to wear. However, one load I desperately needed to do were my...ahem...unmentionables...
...which I had to hand wash in the kitchen sink! Are you KIDDING me?! This was getting a bit too pioneer for my taste!!

All the neighbors decided we were going to grill out whatever meat we could salvage since we were unsure how long the power would be out. We ended up having pork tenderloin, corn, and mashed potatoes...and Daddy made it all on the GRILL! Impressive!
After Carson's third helping of mashed potatoes, he decided to skip the plate and eat straight from the serving spoon. WHAT?!
Geez, Meggie, wonder where he learned THAT?!
They think they are SO cute!
The daytime hours were actually pretty close to normal...the weather was cool enough that we didn't miss the air conditioning and the hot water heater is gas-powered (thankfully), so we still had hot water. The kids spent most of the daytime hours outside with the neighborhood kids...without TV or the computer to keep 'em indoors, what else did they have to do? In the evenings when it got dark, we headed to the back yard to play flashlight tag, tell stories, and make lots of s'mores over the fire pit. The evenings, I must admit, were a lot of fun!

Unfortunately, we ended up suffering through 57 hours without electricity. FIFTY-SEVEN HOURS!! It went from a fun adventure of camping in our house to an all-out I-need-my-hair-dryer-and-washing-machine panic. After 51 hours, I was getting buggy. By 54 hours without electricity, I'll admit I was in tears. (Hey, I'm spoiled...I need the comforts that only electricity can provide and I was DYING to get on the computer!)

The kids mostly had fun...but there were meltdowns with them, too:
I left one of my bedroom lamps on Tuesday when I went to bed, hoping the power would come on in the middle of the night and wake me up. It worked! A few minutes after midnight, the lamp came on! I was never so happy to be awakened from a deep sleep!

I had to go to work yesterday, but Daddy stayed home to get the house back in order and restock the groceries that had to be thrown out. Even after hours (and hundreds of dollars) spent at Kroger, our freezer still looks like this:
The freezer and refrigerated sections of the grocery were fairly empty, so Daddy grabbed what he could find. That's OK...we survived 57 hours of pioneer living, we can surely survive a limited supply of cold and frozen foods.

I think I'll go turn on a light right now and watch some TV...just because I can!