My Mom was out of town yesterday, so a buddy from work and his wife were kind enough to take Lilian for the day. She had a great time playing with their two boys, and they kept me up to date all day with pictures and videos of the kids all playing together.
(Note to self: Lilian loves Spider Man.)
(And now she also loves climbing on things.)
(D’oh!)
I stopped on the way back to their place to pick up pizza for the kids and salads for us moms by way of a thank you (my buddy was working the evening shift). We had a nice little dinner together and then the kids played some more. “What a nice evening this is,” I thought.
(Famous last thoughts.)
And then…. my phone rang. It was Kristian. Calling to let me know that a transformer near our house caught fire and that a good chunk of the neighborhood was without power. I will give you exactly one guess as to wether or not that chunk included our house.
(I’ll give you a hint, my phone chose that very moment to beep at me that I was down to 10% battery life. And I stayed to top it up a bit.)
(Also, noooooooooooooooo!!!!)
Lilian and I made our way back home, only to discover that a bunch of the neighbors had congregated up the street to discuss the situation and to commiserate. We all had a good chuckle about the power company’s estimate that we’d have power back on in an hour (spoiler alert: we totally did not have power back on in an hour). Everyone was complaining about how hot their houses were without any AC on. I very proudly announced that Kristian had just installed a screen door on our 2nd floor deck, so we were going to be able to open up some windows and doors, create a cross-breeze, and it was going to be awesome.
(Famous last words.)
You know what helps with cross-breezes? Ceiling fans. You know what helps with ceiling fans? Electricity. The house wasn’t as stifling as it could have been, but it was not exactly pleasant. Or getting any more pleasanter.
Lilian was tired and cranky from being kept out so late (we stayed at our friends’ house as long as possible in order to take advantage of the fact that it didn’t feel like a swamp in there). Putting her to bed in the dark as she melted down was just all kinds of extra special fun. All I can say is…. at least her night light has a battery in it.
I sat on the sunporch crocheting until the sun went down. And then I sat on the front porch crocheting with a headlamp on. It was almost an adventure, if you forget the part where our house was getting more and more swamp-like.
Also, someone had to make sure that the last drumstick in the freezer didn’t melt, so I took one for the team:
We ended up going to bed pretty early, which didn’t really help much. Because it was too hot to sleep properly. And poor Lilian kept waking up screaming. I’m not 100% sure what was going on there, but I suspect that she is not used to the swamp life.
The power came rumbling back on around 2AM Or maybe it was 4AM? Or 5AM? I have no idea, actually. The AM wake ups all started to run together. All I know is, we all got woken up a lot last night. And it is crazy loud in our house when the power comes back.
I was unable to drag my butt out of bed at a reasonable time today. Poor Lilian had to be woken up herself. We were not a happy family this morning. Lucky for me, I had the option to work from home. Which means that I’m gonna hit post on this here entry and then take a 15 minute nap. It might take the edge off.
We ended up being pretty lucky, over-all. Nothing in the fridge or freezer went bad, probably because we didn’t touch the fridge and I only opened the freezer long enough to grab my ice cream and an ice cube tray. Our neighbor had to run his generator because the water in his sump pump was getting a little too high for comfort. Kristian checked our basement and we had about 6 inches to spare. If we’d had any more rain in the last few days, it could have been problematic. We don’t have a generator. We would have probably had to deal with some flooding at that point.
(Or maybe run an extension cord from our sump pump over to the neighbor’s generator.)
(Because he’s nice like that.)
If the power goes out and the only lasting effect is that we’re all kinda exhausted the next day? That’s a win in my book. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a cat nap to take.