Are You Prepared?

On January 26th, we had a snow storm pass through that left us with about 8 inches of snow.  The snow was extremely wet and heavy and caused power outages all over the city due to falling branches.  Here in our front yard, you can see one of our front trees had three branches come down.  A further out you can see the tree in the middle of the cul-de-sac had a branch come down.  And beyond that you can see another neighbors tree with branches down.  We even had a neighbor who had a couple of large branches fall on top of his house, but luckily they did no damage.  We lost power that night at about 9 p.m.  It did not come back on until Friday night for only two hours.  Then on Saturday evening we had power for about six hours.  Finally, on Sunday morning we had power restored for good.  It wasn't easy, but we made it through!  The first night wasn't so bad because for some reason, I knew the power was going to go out, so I cranked up the heater and just let it run.  I guess you know you are going to lose power when the lights start flickering and you see branches falling everywhere.  It would probably have been easier to deal with if you didn't have to do anything, you could just snuggle up in bed and read a book or have a good excuse to sleep.  But kids still need to eat and dishes still need to be washed.  Luckily we have a gas range and gas water heater so we could cook and have hot water.  Washing dishes by hand wasn't all that great, but it did keep you a little warmer!  We even fed the missionaries without power!  We made Navajo Tacos by candle and lantern light.  The hardest part was when the sun went down, and because it's winter, the sun goes down early.  It's too hard to do things by candle light or lantern light, except read.  So any chores that needed to get done needed to be done before the sun set.  I sound like a pioneer or something!  The kids spent a good part of each day playing outside in the snow.  It was no warmer inside than out.  We finally broke down and built a fire on Saturday morning.  We don't know when the chimney was inspected last, so we were a bit leary, but Todd shined the flashlight up the chimney, didn't notice anything clogging it up, and decided to go ahead and build a fire just this one time.  It was nice to have a fire going.  And thanks to many years of experience in building fires at Girls' Camp, I kept that succor roarin'!  It warmed up part of the room a little, you kept nice and warm right near the fire.  When the power came back on on Saturday, I started to do laundry.  I didn't know it was going to go off again later that night!  Thankfully all the Sunday clothes were washed.  Nothing go ironed, but they didn't look too bad.  And I think that Sunday was the only Sunday I have gone to church without washing my hair.  I took a shower but because we had no electricity I couldn't use a blow dryer so I didn't want my hair to get wet.  It didn't look too bad and we didn't really smell like smoke, right? hahahahaha  The frumpy, smoke smellin' family comes to church on Sunday!  It was definatley an experience.  I never even thought about breaking into the 72-hour kits.  Todd said he thought about it once, but since we had gas and could cook, saw no need of getting them out.  The things we learned were number one priority was heat or some way of keep warm.  Second priority was light.  Our third priority was food, but this wasn't a big deal at the time, but in another situation it could be.  We have also concluded that the basement is the warmest part of the house in the winter when the power goes out because it is insulated by the earth.  This is were we will sleep next time when and if the power goes out.  And most importantly, the children have learned that they can entertain themselves without the use of electronic devices, a very painful lesson I'm sure they'd say!