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.