59 Hours Too Many

My friend Beth sent me this meme. Sums up my feelings and emotional state quite nicely.

We woke up last Monday morning to an awfully chilly house. Ollie is a super light sleeper and gave us the blow by blow of power outages during the night based on when his clock was on or off and I realized we hadn’t had constant power since 1 or 2 am. (I think it went off for good at 3 am.) I started bossing the boys around and told them to put on more layers immediately and they scoffed at me and told me I was over reacting. In turn this heightened my panic and mama-bear-ness. “I said go put on another pair of socks!” I yelled. “You cannot wear shorts right now!” They skulked off and obliged. My best guess was that we were not going to have heat for a good long bit; possibly not until Tuesday. Jon’s best guess was that power would be restored later that morning (that’s what our energy provider said on their website). At one point I really thought I was going to lose it when Ollie said, “Isn’t this cool? Mom and Dad are super stressed out and it’s cool to hear them talk about making plans and stuff!!” Ollie was sent to his room for 30 minutes for his safety and my sanity.

Legos with Noey. I bought those gloves for someone for Christmas and then decided to keep them. (Not sorry.)

Around 1 or 2 in the afternoon when our house was a brisk 58 degrees we decided to take up our friend’s offer to come and rescue us. (Around this time Ollie said, "I feel like our house is getting colder." Oye. Duh. "That's because our house is getting colder and will continue to get colder." Ollie, "oh.") They had a four wheel drive truck, plus power and water, and lived close by. We threw some groceries and pillows together, got the puppies, left the faucets trickling and headed out the door. 

Everyone was in a super good mood to start with. Kids played switch, grownups talked, layers were shed as we were in a balmy 70 degree house once again. 

After being there about 2 hours everything suddenly shut off. I have no idea why this hadn’t crossed my mind, but I was so taken aback by our rescue house losing power! We were all hoping we were apart of the rolling blackouts and that power would be back on in 45 minutes. After 2 hours it was apparent that rolling blackouts were wishful thinking. We decided to go ahead and sleep there though, as the temp in the house was so much higher to start the night than our house. 

Spoons, Life, Twister, and a talent show were on the agenda for No Power: Day 2. 

We started texting around to other folks on day 2 to make a game plan for the night, as now we realized we were in this for another 24 hours at least. A friend could tell by using the thermometer app on his phone for the church offices that they still had electricity, so we made a game plan to head there next. Jon and our friend Joe went back to our house to grab more blankets and food from the pantry and Jon said the house was now 48 degrees. Brrrr! Joe took our family over to the church where we had electricity! Whoop! But..... water lines were frozen. Ugh! 

Our friends came over for dinner with us, but decided they were on team water and went back to their house for the night. We were definitely on team electricity and opted to sleep on the church office couches for the night. (Super good news side note: our friends power was restored that night, so they woke up cozy PLUS had working bathrooms.) There was freezing rain that night as well as no sun the next day, so we planned on staying put. Later that afternoon Jon saw someone post on our neighborhood facebook group that they had electricity again, and it was soon confirmed by other neighbors! Faithful Joe and his truck picked us up yet again and brought us home. We had a warming up house AND water! We got home around 4 pm on Wednesday and we figured our house had been without electricity for just over 60 hours, which seemed like 59 hours too many. Meanwhile Texas was breaking every record in the book and had below freezing temps for 6 days in a row. 

All told, school has been disrupted for SEVEN days (not including weekends), and Jon took hazard leave for the week as the road he drives to the office wasn't even open until Saturday. Neighbors have been filling up buckets of water from us so they can flush their toilets and we still have a boil order in effect. Crazy. The boys went back to school today; I said no thank you to an offer to sub today and attempted the grocery store yet again. When covid first hit and I saw an aisle or two empty at the store it was super weird. Well, now imagine that, only it's about 10 aisles completely empty. Even weirder. 

Of course it was 73 on Sunday, so we are back to a normal Texas spring. 

Save us some bananas and bread, please!