It Was The Best Of Times....

...it was the worst of times. (snort, giggle, giggle) Wait... PLEASE tell me you know where that comes from?

Our power is on now, our water... still frozen. We did everything we could to prevent the pipes from freezing, but I guess it just is the curse of this house. It was a boring 36+ hours - DH actually ended up stuck at work until yesterday morning since the roads were a mess. When he came home, we all just played board games and stayed around the fire to keep warm.

While this has not exactly been the time of my life, we were incredibly lucky: so many folks here had trees fall on their homes or in their yards, and our trees are just fine. We had heat; when so many people went cold. Our car made it home in one piece; when so many were stranded on the side of the road. And we had plenty of shelf stable food that we could snack on! (Plus I was caught up mostly on laundry so we had plenty of clean, warm clothing!)

Hmmm... I just realized I never posted that review I was going to on the Coleman lantern - I'm posting that later tonight. That lantern is worth it's weight in gold for terrible weather! The light is almost as great as a lamp, and we were able to just use that to do everything around here.

As far as the fridge, well, I'm not going to freak out about it. It is covered under the house insurance, but there's a $500 deductible and we all know I can do better replacing everything than that. The contents of the deep freezer was still completely frozen solid. (I keep it up an extra notch just in case this happens so trust me, everything was like a rock!)

Some of the snow actually started melting a bit during the day yesterday, so I'm pretty sure as it gets warmer over the next few days it will be completely gone. I think the high today is supposed to be 27 (it's 24 right now as I look) so I'm not sure too much will go today, but maybe tomorrow. At least the sun is out! :)

I did learn a lot about our preparedness situation though, and while we were great on lots of things, we still have a lot of holes to fix. We definitely need more batteries for the lantern and flashlights, and I need to store more water for chores - we had plenty of drinking water, but not enough for flushing more than once a day for instance. (Can you say YUCK?) As soon as the water is back on, I'm running straight into the shower and scrubbing - sponge baths just don't cut it!

To all those traveling today, have a safe journey! May you all have a wonderful time spent with your loved ones!