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...