Hour 168

Exactly 7 days 0 hours since the lights went out - approx. 54,000 customers still without power in the Buffalo area. Including yours truly - but there are now street lights on literally 1 1/2 blocks away. I'm optimtistic that this will be the last night without electricity.

Let's rewind the clock back a bit to Wed. night. Ironwolf got off on his trip to Detroit just fine, albeit a little late due to weather issues in Detroit. We managed just fine here without him.

But at 3 AM that night, I woke up feeling really ill. After taking a minute to clear the grogginess from my head, I realized what kind of ill it was - I was nauseous. So here I'm thinking, oh great, food poisoning, or the flu, this is not what I need now... I stumble off to the bathroom in the pitch black and sit on the edge of the bathtub for a bit. I come to the realization that I am not in immediate danger of throwing up, so I visit the kids for a few minutes and wander downstairs, eventually falling asleep semi-upright on the couch. Around 4:15 I awaken to Drake's cries and dash upstairs, again in the pitch black. He had a bad bloody nose. With that rectified, and my stomach settled (who knows why I felt so sick before) it was back to bed for everyone.

Now yesterday early in the morning came a pickup truck carrying about 10 people, some armed with chainsaws. I figured out pretty quick that they were from the town (or contracted by the town). They moved all the tree branches and the like off the curbs and onto one side of the street, then loaded everything up into a truck to haul it away. Yay!

But then comes the strange part. About an hour later, a bucket truck pulls up in front of my house from a company I'd never heard of - and there's a guy up one of my trees in the back yard cutting off limbs. He proceeds to go through the other yards on the street doing the same thing. So I'm assuming he was also contracted by the town to help with the problem of cracked and split limbs still in the trees. I'm grateful, of course, since it was going to be a terribly expensive prospect if we had to take care of the problem ourselves (as would normally be the case, and even with the assistance we may have to call someone in later). But now my yard is littered with tree limbs all over again, and worse, I had to pluck large logs lodged in the branches of the trees and wedged onto the chain-link fence in the back of the yard.

Now, wouldn't it have made more sense to send that guy through first and then a day or two later send the workers to clean up the debris?

We've got a little bit of gutter damage, but insurance should cover that. No big deal. Hell, there's some people with holes in their houses, and others (including a friend of mine) had basement flooding so bad that they will have to replace their furnace and hot water tank.

We went over to my SIL's today to do some laundry because I couldn't get our dryer started again without overloading the generator. I don't know, we managed it before, but just couldn't get it to work this time.

The kids have been bothering me literally every two minutes writing this, so I'll go tend to their needs now. More pics tomorrow.

Hour 160

There are utility crews just a couple blocks away! Oooh, maybe power by nightfall!

Got lots to tell but I'm off to the SIL's right now.

Hour 123

Yesterday I took the kids to the playground, taking photos of mangled trees around the school. These are just a few examples. There's an estimated 30,000 trees in my town alone that suffered damage from the storm. It's really quite sad - there were a lot of beautiful old trees in the area. Some of them will be gone entirely, and many of them won't return to their former glory for a decade or two.

As of this morning there was still 150,000 customers without power. (I think it's closer to 100,000 tonight). School is cancelled through tomorrow, but chances are it's going to be the whole week, as we are still slated for Sunday for power restoration. It looks like at least six school districts are going to be out of snow days, and so they are negotiating with the state to see if they can get their mandatory school year length reduced. After all, winter hasn't even started yet. It's more likely though that the state will force the districts to use vacation days instead, so there goes spring break. Well, we shall see.

Ironwolf is away now. He'll be back tomorrow night. Too bad the poor baby had to miss the Sabres game. 9-1 over the Flyers! Holy hand grenades, Batman! Ah, life is good...

But Ironwolf's grandmother (also without power) had a nasty fall down the stairs and broke her shoulder joint. She's doing as well as can be expected, and she is staying with one of Ironwolf's aunts (one *with* power, of course). The poor dear has already had a major shoulder injury a few years ago - I'm rather hoping that this is the same shoulder, or she is going to have terrible difficulties.

Let's see, what else...

Random had us over for dinner last night. It was wonderful! I didn't realize how badly I needed to get away from the house and out with other people. I'd had some other invitations before from people, but I wasn't really ready to leave the house yet. And the pasta dinner was perfect - let me tell you, it is tough to make pasta with my limited cooking options. Thank you!

On Sunday I headed off to my cold, dark church. Nobody said that church was cancelled, and I had promised the choir director that I was going to be there this week (before the storm) because lots of choir members were scheduled to be away. Amazingly, about 40 people still showed up! We set up chairs in the narthex where we could get some sunshine, Pastor Kay put the kettles on the gas stove so there was hot drinks, the folks providing treats for the coffee hour showed up, we pulled out the port-a-altar and the battery pack for the portable keyboard, and there ya go! Good service - glad they decided to abandon the scheduled Job sermon for something a little lighter.

Today I trekked out to the grocery stores with the kids. It was very busy, but not the ridiculous busy that it had been in earlier days. I'm still being very cautious about the perishables that I buy because I'm only running the fridge a couple hours a day. Plus there's still the issue of being able to cook the food that I bought. So, for the first time in a couple years, Chef Boyardee is gracing my household. But since I noticed that Ying's (the combination Chinese/pizza/every other cuisine you can think of all under one roof joint) is open maybe I'll buy dinner for the kids there tomorrow. They are close, and they are just inside the town line, so I know their water is safe without boiling. Come to think of it, I don't know if the water advisories are still in effect.

I know I've babbled on for quite a bit, so I'd better go - don't want to waste more gasoline that I have to. I'm probably not going to do much blog reading while the power's still down. And maybe someday I'll actually be able to get to all those posts that I said that I was going to do before the storm hit! Ok, more likely they'll all fall by the wayside...

Hour 89

For those of you getting this through RSS, my apologies. It seems that I am incapable of doing simple addition in my head. I'm an idiot, but what else is new?

89 hours without power other than that provided by the generator. Counting my blessings. Hell, I'm even able to do laundry - I'm just limited to running one major appliance at a time. Still can't cook though because it draws too much power. So cooking is done on the grill or over my fondue pot's alcohol burner.

Some people still don't have hot water, or clean water. I think that because my town is one of the few places outside the city that has a reliable source of clean water that this is the reason that we are slated to be among the last communities for power restoration - now estimated for Sunday.

Half the neighborhood's abandoned. We cleaned up our own tree limbs and helped out a bit with the next-door neighbor's, plus Ironwolf has been hauling the generator to relatives' houses so they can get their homes a little warmer and get their basements pumped out.

Ironwolf had to work today (despite the fact that Amherst still has a driving ban), leaving us alone for the first time, but we are doing fine. Unfortunately, it looks like he will have to fly off to Michigan tomorrow evening, but it should just be for about a day. I'll just have to know how to get the generator running plus the specifics of the funky wiring job we've got going to support this.

So still doing ok, but it's going to be a long time before things get back to normal. I'll try to have some pics up tomorrow.

After the Storm

Most of you probably already know what has happened here in the Buffalo area. The locals are obviously living it, and the rest of you have probably seen it on the national news.

There is quite a lot of damage out here. Trees and power lines down everywhere, with over 300,000 customers without power. We are also without power, but we have a generator going now which provides enough to keep us warm, the basement dry, to try to save the contents of our freezer, and to whip off a quick message to everyone out there (oh, and to watch the hockey game - Go Sabres!).

It may be as much as a week before we have power again, so don't expect to hear much from me. But do not worry about us - unlike many, many people out here, we are warm, relatively dry, have water, and have enough food and gasoline to get us through the next couple days.

Here are a couple pics for your "enjoyment"



The view into my next-door neighbor's back yard




An oblique view down the street early Fri. morning




Down the street (late morning) - note neighbor's car with branch atop

Note To Self: Ask Readers If Blog Looks Sucky

My blog layout looks much different in Mozilla than it does at home with IE, mostly having to do with the color scheme. Is anyone out there having difficulty reading because of the colors on the blog?

Blizzard!

The snow has finally come, and with what a bang! It's blizzardy nightmare out there folks, and tonight I am out there.

I went to choir practice as usual, but the power was out so it was canceled. I am now at the library, since I had books due today, so I figured I'd stay in for a bit and take advantage of the lovely high-speed Internet capabilities available here. While Mom's away (i.e. without the kids), she will play!

There's tree branches down everywhere, and even a small tree down in one of the neighbor's yards. I will admit serious trepidation about driving under some of those heavily snow-laden limbs bent precariously over the road. Scary stuff. Thankfully it's a short drive home from here.

But to go back a couple hours in time - when I went to pick up Rascal from school this afternoon I experienced one of the strangest weather phenomena I have ever witnessed. It was sunny, with mixed rain, snow, and hail, and there was thunder not-so-distant. Really weird. Only in Buffalo...

The Week That Was

Yeah, yeah, it's been a week since I've posted. Nobody's been waiting with bated breath.

So let's recap:

Most important on the ol' list is my 34th birthday! Yay for me! More to come on that in a bit, I've got a lot to say.

Ironwolf got back from Vegas just fine, albeit several hours late because of flight delays (so that he finally got back home at 4 AM - ugh!). Sadly, he did not win a million dollars.

To go back a little farther than a week, the whole clan went to the Great Pumpkin Farm in Clarence for loads of family fun! More on that in a bit too; I'm just getting the pictures off my camera now.

Go Sabres! Go Sabres! Go Sabres! Woooooo!!!!! 3-0, rock and roll, baby! But somebody get me a defibrillator for Christmas if every game is going to be this exciting!

Zipper was very proud to be Star Student of the Day yesterday in his class. Which really just means that he's the one that gets to bring in something for show-and-tell and he gets to bring the "Daily News" page home.

I've made up with that Tae Kwon Do instructor that I was having issues with last month. I'm having some struggles right now in TKD, but I'll save that for another post too (that's three auxiliary posts already!).

My solo in church went really well as expected. I have to admit though, I feel a little weird accepting compliments from the congregation. It just doesn't seem like something that I should be congratulated about, especially in church. Know what I'm saying?

I really need to get my butt moving on my annual Halloween party. I haven't even sent out invitations yet. Well, local yokels, it will be Sat. Oct. 28, 6 PM at my place. This year's movie will be the Hong Kong kung-fu vampire hit, Mr. Vampire. As always, bring the kids, costumes optional.

I'm sure I've bored you all enough by now. TTFN!

Wisdom Check!

I really need to lay off the nerdy Dungeons and Dragons catchphrases. Wouldn't want anyone to think that I was uncool! LOL

Wisdom check made: While shopping at BJ's (the wholesale club) today I successfully resisted buying the 12 lb. bag of baking soda! Yes, I need baking soda, but not a couple years' supply...

Wisdom check failed: I scrubbed my upstairs bathroom top to bottom today (a horrible, tedious, 4-hour process, literally ceiling to floor). And since my shower curtains were nasty, I threw them into the washing machine. Uh, yeah, it didn't work out well. My nice downstairs shower curtain came through with a rip of a few inches in it. My cheapola upstairs shower curtain was shredded.

Shredded!

No kidding! The washing machine literally tore it into strips, which were all tangled and knotted with each other. Now I'll have to go buy a new one (duh). Stupid stupid stupid...

A Day For Nothing In Particular

So, nobody's going to read about it. But here's the news of the day anyway:

1. Ironwolf has not yet won a million dollars in Vegas.

2. Zipper keeps getting nosebleeds in school. Ugh, they are going to wonder what's wrong with the kid. But I already know:"The doctor says I wouldn't get so many nosebleeds if I'd just keep my darned finger out of there." - Ralphie Wiggum (Crap, I think I quoted that a couple weeks ago when I was talking about Zipper's nosebleeds.)

3. The Sabres' season starts tomorrow! (ooh, hockey hockey hockey hockey hockey...)

4. I really wanted to do some gardening today but it's been raining all day. Damn forecast said it wasn't going to rain until afternoon...

5. Oooh, yay! I get to do my gospel solo in church this Sunday! And may I say with all modesty that I totally rock! (My blog, I can brag if I want to!)

6. When Ironwolf went on his trip he took my new Enigma CD in the car with him! I haven't even listened to it yet! So if I want it I'd have to get it from his car at the airport. Not worth it.

7. I am now a member of the Crazy Hip Blog Mamas ring! I figure with a name like that you can't go wrong!

8. Yesterday was my parents' 35th anniversary! Hooray for matrimonial bliss! They celebrated the anniversary and my mom's new job by buying a PT Cruiser convertable.

I promise, I'll have more interesting stuff tomorrow. Maybe some stuff about the kids, maybe some dish on the relatives, we'll see...

Aw, Why Can't I Go To Vegas Too?

Ironwolf will be zipping off to Las Vegas today for a few days for a conference.

I wanna go too! *whine*

Actually, we knew that this was coming up for a while, and I had intended on going with him, but my mother-in-law finally found a job not long ago, depriving us of the necessary child care.

*sigh* It's better that my MIL has a job than that I get to go to Vegas.

Of course, that doesn't mean that I'm not jealous (on top of all the usual worrying I do when Ironwolf is traveling)!

Oh, well, I guess it's fair play, since I got to go to Vegas last time without him. But I was traveling with my mother-in-law, which means {begin sarcasm} lots of wild and crazy fun {end sarcasm}.