A Little Excitement!

OK, so the storm on Thursday was TERRIFYING for us. Those who have been to my house will know why. For those who haven't, let's just say that the dude who built the house didn't seem to see any point in removing any trees that weren't immediately in his way. So yes, 3 feet from our bedroom window stands a cedar that must be over 100 feet tall (I am horrid at estimating this kind of thing. I figure I could stack my house several times before I got to its height though.) and there are quite a few more in very close proximity. They are tall and healthy, and last summer Bernie-Landlord had the most suspicious of the maples removed, so we were slightly reassured about THAT, but we spent all night listening to the trainlike wind noises, hearing the loud swells approach for a mile or so through forest as they approached us. We heard the gunshot-cracks of large wooden things breaking, the percussions of large things falling. We tried to go to bed at midnight, figuring that there was nothing we could do about it anyway, but it was impossible to sleep while we were laying there fearing that the house would cave in at any moment. We finally decided to forget this trying to sleep shit, and sat there wishing for structural integrity instead. At one point we heard a gunshot crack and a large object falling rather near the house, and we hastily grabbed children and herded them towards the center of the house. But it didn't fall on us (it missed the shed by a tiny bit). In fact, nothing fell on us at all.

But the power did go out. And I did indeed go to finals on Friday anyway, largely because I just wanted to get it the heck out of the way. The drive was a bit of an adventure, and we ended up having the final exam in my assessment partner's home (which may be why her blood pressure was about 10 points higher than usual...), which was great...not only did she have power, she has the rocking-est bathroom ever.

Anyway...my phone proceeded not to get signal at home and people proceeded to call me and think I'd died in my little house amongst the humongous trees, and that sucked.

And we proceeded not to have power until this morning (Monday), and that sucked too. But we had the woodstove (heat) and had filled a few canteens (water) and had about 40lbs of frozen meat in the freezer to sustain the cold in there, so we pulled through without having to even throw out any food. Between the woodstove and a fire outside, we were covered for food, and the lanterns that our Puyallup friends gave us were plenty for light. We were pretty well set for a decent amount of time.

On Sunday night, though, we decided that enough was enough with this not-showering thing, and headed over to BIL's house for the night. Ahhhhh...showers. I hadn't gotten around to mine yet when the power went out on Thursday, so I went from Wednesday morning to Sunday night without a shower. And so did Fran. And the puddle-loving, mud-pie-making children. WORSE THAN CAMPING. OMG I think the only time a shower has felt so good was after that camping trip from dustbowl hell last summer.

And BONUS! sFIL and MIL, who had decided to check in to the Comfort Inn after their house hit 50 degrees and MIL's elderly mom (who has diabetes and extremity problems) started to turn blue, invited us out to eat last night. Now, we'd packed every food item in our fridge and freezer to bring to BIL's house and were well set for food, but it isn't every day that a family as poor as ours gets to go out to eat, so out we went. I don't know whether it was because our expectations were low or because our server ROCKED (she was awesome about Tony's dairy allergy, got him some separately prepared things because, for example, the salad dressing had dairy...I never would have guessed...) but we actually had a GREAT time at the Olive Garden, of all places.

So our power came on this morning, according to NeighborSusan, and we'll head over there once Fran gets off from work. For now I'm stuck at BIL's but there are totally worse places I could be.