Thank God for Electric

Okay maybe I need to be thanking God for natural gas rather than electric. Without natural gas I don't think our family would have survived at home the 81 hours we were without power. So much happened in that forever long three and a half days I feel the need to give a play by play.

12:45 am After a very relaxing Sunday of napping, stocking the kitchen (we knew the weather was going to get bad and wanted to prepare), and cooking soup and baking homemade pecan sticky buns it seemed like this was going to be a great little vacation from all the craziness of this time of year. Like I wrote before I had taken a long nap and stayed up vegging in front of the tv until 12:30. I finally got sleepy enough to go to bed. Fifteen minutes later the electric went off. I woke Jonathan and we decided to go ahead and move the two queen size mattresses to the small living room where the gas log fireplace is. After getting the kids tucked into their new sleeping arrangements we decided we better shower now so we would have hot water. Finally at 2:00am we were asleep.

Powerless at 4:15 am I get a call on my cell phone. Who could be calling at this time? It was my new neighbor and cousin Jenny. She had slipped on the ice while getting firewood and hurt her hip. Jonathan and I ran to her house to see if we could help. As we got to Jenny's the neighbors on the other side of Jenny were pulling a tree off three of their cars. Jenny said Alan (her husband who was working) was on his way to get her to take her to the hospital. I completely flashed back to five years ago when I broke my tailbone on the ice. We were now in charge of Riley. I decided to stay there with her until she woke and then take her to our house.

Powerless at 4:45 am The next hour was spent walking from window to window every time I heard a tree fall which was pretty constant.

Powerless at 5:45 am Riley wakes up. I called Jonathan to help me get over to our house with Riley. Then I changed her and fed her a bottle in the dark trying not to wake all three of our kids that were sleeping 5 feet away.

Powerless at 6:45 am Riley finally goes back to sleep so I lay down and try to sleep again. 10 minutes later Jenny calls and they are heading home. She has bruised her hip. They will shower and be over to get Riley.

Powerless at 7:00 am I decide to outside and survey all the damage. It was crazy. I have never seen anything like this. We had three neighbors taking pictures of the damage at our house.

Powerless at 8:00 am I head back inside to find all three of the kids are up and wondering why we are all sleeping in the small living room. They are also telling us to try again to turn the lights on. I wish it was that simple.

Powerless at 8:45 am We discover we have a gas hot water tank! Yeah! We have hot water.

Powerless at 9:00 am Alan picks up Riley and Jonathan leaves for work.

Powerless at 9:15 am What am I going to do with three kids in one 250 sqft. room with no electric on 2 hours of sleep?

Powerless at 11:30 am We made it to lunch time. I heated up soup for Jonathan and I on the gas log fireplace and the kids roasted hot dogs on the fire. Not Bad!

Powerless at 1:00 pm This is where the real fun begins. I walked through the big living room to get something from the kitchen and water started pouring out of the ceiling fan WHAT! Luckily my parents had just come over to see the damage for themselves. My dad helped me find where it was coming from while my mom stayed with the kids.

Powerless at 1:05 pm Jonathan called right before his meeting with the CEO of the bank to make sure we were okay here at home. I told him what had happened and he rushed home just in time to crawl through a small hole into the attic that I was dreading climbing into. The rest of the afternoon was spent temporarily stopping the leak with lots of buckets. Until the ice on the roof melted this was all we could do. I think we ended up dumping about 10 gallons of water that afternoon. Thank God we stayed at home and discovered the leak. There could have been much more damage.

Powerless at 8:00 pm Not much to do after dark with no electric I went to sleep. Jonathan and the kids played a game of chess and checkers then went to sleep about 8:30.

31 hours w/o power We had a good nights sleep and woke up thinking today was going to go much better than the day before only to find multiple leaks in an area about 10ft by 6ft. Pure panic set in!

37 hours w/o power It is as good as it is going to get. We sealed the hole made by a 2 inch in diameter branch that was sticking in the roof about 2 feet!

44 hours w/o power We had just settled into bed for the night and heard a crashing sound so we ran into the living room to discover the ceiling has caved in. We suspected this would happen and bought a tarp and had it down in preparation for this. Only thing we didn't prepare for was that upon collapsing the soaked drywall and insulation would swing out and hit our entertainment center that we had pulled out of the way. Not much damage was done though. We will just need to clean it up a little.

This was most of the branches and trees after cleanup.

After Tuesday nights collapse nothing really big happened. Wednesday we mainly tried to clean up as much as we could without power. Then Thursday morning at 10:00 the power came back on! YEAH!