Is it cold in here?
The weather has officially sucked lately. I feel I can say this as a state of emergency was declared at the beginning of the week. First it rained. A lot. So we have flash floods, floods and plenty saturated ground. Then it gets cold. Continues to rain, but gets cold. This makes the rain freeze. Enough of this freezing rain to start pulling down trees. LOTS of trees. Of course, the fact that the ground is saturated doesn't help any, as the extra weight of the ice made bunches and bunches of trees uproot themselves. Those trees that weren't uprooted stood there and collected enough ice to break under the weight. *SCHNICK* goes the power, at about 10:30PM Saturday last week. Came back 47 hours later, with various misadventures there between. Rita and Vaughn didn't get their power on until tonight. Parts of Lexington is STILL without power. So. Anyway. Weather. It's been generally rainy and cold all week, and today it decided to go for broke again and threw a tornado watch/warning for Elliott County.
So. What have we been up to during all this? Not a whole lot. Certainly not working, for example. I was supposed to begin my new job Wednesday, but with the power issues and all we decided I might as well wait until Monday. This gave us enough time to actually go somewhere, which we promptly didn't. We've talked about it all week, but all it turned into was a trip to Lexington today, which was nice, but not really much of a vacation. Especially not if you consider the fact that I'm going to go to Lexington every day from Monday and on.
We had lots of fun without power. Or, well. Not really. The first evening, when we were still blissfully unaware of the extent of the damage to the power grid and thinking we'd have power back during the night or so, we lit a million candles in the living room and sat there and read and talked and played cards and mandolin and tatted and such, which was all rather nice. It was less nice the next morning, with inside temperature the same as outside. (35F) We spent the day pretty much at K's parents house, sitting by and cooking on a kerosene heater. Some time during the day a generator was set up too, giving us electric light and providing enough power to keep the fridge/freezer running. As it was nearing bed time we realized that if we wanted to spend the night there we'd be sleeping on the floor with about 20 other people, as just about the entire extended family had gathered where the heater and the generator was. We decided we'd rather go home and run a kerosene heater for long enough to warm the place up a bit and then crawl into bed. Monday was spent largely in the same way, except we went to Olgie and Wanda and had a shower, which was rather wonderful. Same setup at night, only we went back home earlier and kept it warm a bit better. Greg came over at about 6 AM and turned the heater on again and watched it for a while, which was much appreciated. Monday night the power came back on and we spent a good lot of time getting our internet fixes.
The week following was largely spent doing as little as possible. Ken called about his hosting, which he was losing, which we seem to have fixed now. I got a CD and K got a whole bunch of string. Oh! Yesterday we went to H&R Block and had our taxes done. Bad news: They charged us $154 for it. Good news: We get $1030 back. A LOT better than we were thinking. We've talked a whole lot about what we should buy for the money, but it seems now that it will go into savings, as we've been getting more and more into talking about buying a house again, and down payments are a nasty business.
I really feel like I'm forgetting a million things, but it's probably nothing important anyway.
So. What have we been up to during all this? Not a whole lot. Certainly not working, for example. I was supposed to begin my new job Wednesday, but with the power issues and all we decided I might as well wait until Monday. This gave us enough time to actually go somewhere, which we promptly didn't. We've talked about it all week, but all it turned into was a trip to Lexington today, which was nice, but not really much of a vacation. Especially not if you consider the fact that I'm going to go to Lexington every day from Monday and on.
We had lots of fun without power. Or, well. Not really. The first evening, when we were still blissfully unaware of the extent of the damage to the power grid and thinking we'd have power back during the night or so, we lit a million candles in the living room and sat there and read and talked and played cards and mandolin and tatted and such, which was all rather nice. It was less nice the next morning, with inside temperature the same as outside. (35F) We spent the day pretty much at K's parents house, sitting by and cooking on a kerosene heater. Some time during the day a generator was set up too, giving us electric light and providing enough power to keep the fridge/freezer running. As it was nearing bed time we realized that if we wanted to spend the night there we'd be sleeping on the floor with about 20 other people, as just about the entire extended family had gathered where the heater and the generator was. We decided we'd rather go home and run a kerosene heater for long enough to warm the place up a bit and then crawl into bed. Monday was spent largely in the same way, except we went to Olgie and Wanda and had a shower, which was rather wonderful. Same setup at night, only we went back home earlier and kept it warm a bit better. Greg came over at about 6 AM and turned the heater on again and watched it for a while, which was much appreciated. Monday night the power came back on and we spent a good lot of time getting our internet fixes.
The week following was largely spent doing as little as possible. Ken called about his hosting, which he was losing, which we seem to have fixed now. I got a CD and K got a whole bunch of string. Oh! Yesterday we went to H&R Block and had our taxes done. Bad news: They charged us $154 for it. Good news: We get $1030 back. A LOT better than we were thinking. We've talked a whole lot about what we should buy for the money, but it seems now that it will go into savings, as we've been getting more and more into talking about buying a house again, and down payments are a nasty business.
I really feel like I'm forgetting a million things, but it's probably nothing important anyway.