In The Dark

My week so far has not been much fun. On Monday evening I heard on the news that a wind storm was moving in. Around 8:00 p.m. that night we had a big thunder and lightening storm followed by the worst winds we have had in a long time. The wind was blowing so hard that many unidentified flying objects were forcefully hitting my windows. I was afraid that a branch was going to break through one of said windows. The non stop rain was blowing horizontally. The lights were flickering off and on for half an hour. Around 9:00 p.m. the power went out.....................

I sat in the silenced dark for a few hours, trying to read by candle light. I didn't want to wake my OH up to have him hook up the generator. I have hooked the generator up by myself before, but that was last winter and I had some practice that season due to many wind storms. I am not very good at remembering how to do things if I don't do them often enough, so attempting the generator was not an option.

I finally went to bed and woke up at 4:00 a.m. to my OH asking if I would unhook the generator before I went to work. He was going to get it started so we could run the fridge and fish aquariums. We have a lot of experience with extended power outages, since we do lose power 99.9% of the time during wind storms. And we have learned over the years that since we have chosen to live on the outskirts of town that we are not on PUD's priority list for getting our power back on quickly. We do have many trees that fall during these storms and one of the roads going out of our neighborhood was shut down, most likely to downed trees over the power lines. So we knew it could be awhile.

Pictures taken from the snow storm in December 2008. We had over 2 feet of snow, and it stuck around for a long time....something we are not used to here.



Later that morning I arrived to work at 8:00 a.m. Besides being dark at home, it was also dark at the barn. Pitch dark. We went and checked all the horses outside to make sure that they were all okay. A couple of the run in sheds lost some roofing. But all the horses looked okay. We are on a well at the farm, so we had to get the generator out at work so we could get water to the horses. My boss also hooked up some lights in the main barn aisle way so we could sorta see what we were doing. We pretty much just lunged horses all day. Our arena that is right off the main barn, is only enclosed on 2 sides, so we do get natural light there. It was just hard to see when we were in the barn itself. My boss also long lined a few horses in the round pen. We got every horse turned out and I was back home by 3:00 p.m.



It was still dark at home. So I called my OH to have him walk me through hooking the generator back up. I wanted to get the fridge and fish tanks going again. I got it working, after fighting with the darn thing for a few minutes. I made a fire in the wood stove and then sat down to read my book. I was bored.There isn't much to do when you have no power. Most of the time when we don't have power, we still have cable, so with the generator running we can watch t.v., but this was not the case. When the power went out, so did the cable and the phone. I felt like I was Laura Ingalls on Little House On The Prairie.
My OH picked us up dinner from Five Guys Burger and Fries. We tried to stay warm. He went to bed while I continued reading my book, hoping the power would come on soon. It had been 21 hours since the power went out.

It was just about midnight and I was thinking of going to bed. I had one more chapter in my book I was going to read when I heard the familiar beeping sound from the microwave. Power! Light! Thank goodness! 27 hours later, and I finally felt a little civilized again. I went to shut down the generator and then crawled into bed.



Now there is talk of potential snow over the weekend. It has been quite cold here already, but it is supposed to be in the 20's with highs in the low 30's, gasp! We do get some cold weather here, but not all that often. We are really just used to a lot of rain. When it snows here, everything shuts down. People here do not know how to drive in the snow. They literally freak out. I don't mind if it snows, as long as it doesn't stick around for long. Although I hear we are supposed to have a really cold, wet and snowy winter.......the worst one we've had since the 1950's. Maybe it will be something to look forward to.....a dreary winter.