who needs electricity?

Losing your electricity for days at a time stinks. For real it really stinks. You should smell my house right now. I had to spend the day throwing out everything from my fridge and freezer. Hundreds of dollars worth of food. And cleaning melted ice cream off the bottom of your freezer is no easy task. It's gross. Thankfully my pampered chef scraper came in handy for that job. I've been spraying Febreeze like a mad woman trying to get rid of the stench. But the good news is my fridge is now sparkling clean!!

The other good news is that my kids learned a valuable lesson in teamwork. The neighbors right beside us lost several trees and some siding off their house. On Monday when Andy got home from work the first thing he did was go to their house and help out. The kids quickly followed. They picked up sticks, raked, ran the wood chipper and wheelbarrowed. Okay so wheelbarrowed may not officially be a word...but this is my blog so I can make it a word here if I want to. Is it barrel or barrow? Maybe I should've looked that up before I posted it. That's just too much work for me today though! Anyways I worked on our yard while my family helped the neighbors out in their yard. In return, the neighbors took all of our limbs, sticks and debris and put it through their wood chipper. When their yard was almost done their Daughter, Merritt, came over to help me with our yard. She was a huge help. For some reason just her presence over here made my kids want to work alongside her. How's come kids are thrilled to help out anyone and everyone except their parents? Merritt also kept the kids entertained. Because all work and no play make for a dull day, they caught and observed bugs. They found a praying mantis and then fed crickets to it. Merritt totally upped her cool factor with Isaac when she not only touched the bugs but was actually quite knowledgable about them. Speaking of Isaac...he showed everyone how smart he is. When the wood chipper suddenly stopped Isaac suggested that it was outta gas. The adults assured him that was NOT the case. After about 5 minutes of tinkering with no success they decided to pour some gas in. Whaddya know...Isaac was right. It took 2 days but our yard is finally as cleaned up as it's gonna get. And we got to know our neighbors a little better.

One of the worst parts about the electric being out is not having any working stop lights. I thought everyone knew it turned into an automatic 4 way. Not really here. It was more like a free for all. Try to imagine 16 lanes of traffic all trying to go 4 different directions at the same time!! I prayed, held my breath, bit my nails and prayed some more. Then I breathed a huge sigh of relief when we finally made it home. And vowed not to venture out on my own again until power is restored to all of our city. Franklin county alone still has about 220,000 customers without service. The other surrounding counties only have tens of thousands of customers without service. Maybe by next week I can venture back out on my own again. We also had cell phone issues. Because we don't have a land line and we don't have electricity we really worried when our cells got down to one bar of power. Andy HAD to go to Starbuck's to plug his in a couple of times. I'm sure it was a real chore for him. Coffee, quiet and solitude. Yeah I really felt bad for him. He also had a real hard workday on Monday. They didn't have power there either. The company wanted them to stay however just in case it suddenly came back on. They were worried about shutting Honda down. So he got to sit in his car all day and work on his own stuff. He drank coffee, read books, and wrote books as well. All by himself. In the quiet. Yeah it was real hard on him.