All is well

I'm back. One week later, almost to the hour, we got the electricity back that Hurricane Ike so selfishly took away. Here's a video of the winds at our house last Sunday (09/15). You can see the torn canopy blowing in the wind -- and that was just one hour into the storm (which lasted about six hours). You can also hear the sirens in the background -- those were pretty much non-stop for many hours! One week without electricity and, apparently more important, without hot water. I found it much easier to be without television and the computer than I did to go without a hot bath or shower. Cooking was not a problem, though we do have an electric stove. We used to do a lot of tent-camping when my kids were growing up, and we still have our old propane camping stove, as well as the propane grill. I set up a small "kitchen" on my back deck, and could cook and heat up water easily. I will say, when an emergency such as this hits your home, it pays to be organized. We had flashlights and lanterns and a good supply of fresh batteries, candles, candleholders and one of those long Bic lighters -- all located together and within easy reach. I had heavy duty potholders with the camping stove, a fresh bottle of propane ready to go. I had a well stocked pantry so food was not a problem -- in fact, we actually ate quite well! Our neighbor is on a different power grid than we are, and when he offered us an extension cord from his house, I used it to fire up the crockpot during the day. We ate homemade beef stew, roast chicken, and frozen ravioli with meatballs. On the grill, we had BBQ pork chops and hamburgers. The good news -- I did not have a lot of meat in my freezers (I have a small chest freezer plus the refrigerator freezer). Bad news -- I lost all of the bags and containers of tomato sauce and veggies I'd frozen from the garden just a few weeks ago. Helpful Hint - I emptied out our chest freezer on Tuesday (48 hours into the power outage), and then placed our cooler IN the chest freezer and packed ice both in it and around the outside of it. I was able to keep the meat I did have (roast chicken, stew beef, pork chops, meatballs) frozen solid until I could use them up. So life here is returning to normal. I have two weeks worth of laundry to catch up on, 500+ emails to read (and mostly delete), and a post-vacation car to clean out. (I'll catch up tomorrow on details on the great vacation we had!) But it's all good. Our week without power was definitely an inconvenience, but there are certainly folks out there hit a lot harder by Hurricane Ike than we were!