Our flight
finally did get to leave. We reach cruising altitude and I
still cannot sleep. So I read. The Chicago based flight attendant brings around drinks. Yet another Diet Coke. Too short a flight for anything else. Unless I want to pay $2 for 1/2 can of Pringles that is. You know, they don't serve pretzles or peanuts or ANYTHING anymore. Cheap ass bastards!
The pilot announces we will be landing in approximately 10 minutes. I'm sitting by the window. I look out and cannot see a thing but clouds. It's a thick soup of clouds. What seems like 15 minutes later I look out again and still see nothing but clouds then suddenly I catch a faint glimpse of something strange and white and very wrong before it's gone in the clouds again. Though it was wrong I knew enough to realize what I had seen.
It was the landscape entirely coated with ice. The trees were all bent towards the ground, even the big ones, and I knew this potentially meant
BIG trouble for landing this aircraft. Obviously, ice, runways and airplanes do not mix at all and I was terrified that we would either not be able to land at all or that we would attempt to set down and simply go skidding down the runway.
Unbeknownst to me, there was potential for another problem. One of my traveling companions was seated very close to the front and prior to takeoff, she overheard the flight attendant asking the pilot where he would take us if unable to land in Anytown. "Right back here!" NOOOOOOO!!!!! I don't ever want to see the inside of that terminal again. (The fact that I have to fly back up there in mid-February not withstanding!)
We finally pull down out of the clouds for good and I feel that my fears are confirmed. I have lived in Anytown almost all of my life and I don't think I have ever seen an ice storm like this. I know I have never seen the effects of one from the air. All types, sizes and shapes of trees were either bent over and touching the ground or they were broken off. The grass was coated. Signs were coated. All surfaces of everything was coated. Everything it turns out, but roadways and runways. Yea!!!!!
When the pilot sat that bird down, I could have wept I was so happy to be on the ground, safe and sound and in Anytown. Just thinking about it again brings tears to my eyes. The entire plane broke out in cheers and applause. Then they couldn't get the door to the jet bridge open, it had iced over.
We all gathered our luggage and headed to the vehicle. Not a lot of ice on the street or sidewalk. I see some on the parking lot and am in the process of telling my cohorts to be careful when I almost fall. I let out this big yelp and almost pee my pants, scaring them in the process. Arriving at the vehicle, we have to beat on it with our fists before we can even open it to get to the scraper and the defroster. It is crusted under a good 2" layer of ice. It takes about 15 minutes to sufficiently free the vehicle from its icy tomb enough to drive. We get our traveling companion to her street, marveling at the destruction and devestation we see on just this short ride. Anytown is (was) a picturesque place full of large, old trees or as the realtors say, "mature landscaping". Now... how can I put it? Not so much.
Large trees were snapped in half. Small trees were split in thirds. Branches the size of small cars came crashing down, smashing anything in their path and naturally, snapping power lines in the process. We passed an old fashioned filling station that still sells propane and kerosene and not really keying in on what was going on immediately, it took us a moment to realize why there was a line of what looked to be 100 people with cans. They were standing in line to purchase some of the only fuel left in the area to power their emergency heat and lighting.
As we came further south, things didn't seem quite as bad. Not much down in my neighborhood. All my neighbors but approximately 8 still had power. Not so bad. But getting quite cold at my house. Called the hubby when the plane touched down to let him know. He was helping my mom and my aunt get my grandparents moved into a hotel. They and my aunt had no power either. My grandmother is 90 and has beginning Alzeheimers and my grandfather is 88 and is still recovering from a broken hip. He is supposed to go to the dr. Monday and see if he can start walking on it and begin physical therapy.
I go in and it is rather dark because our house doesn't have bunches of nautral light anyway but it is very overcast so it is even darker than normal. It is also getting chilly. It's down to about 60 degrees. Luckily we have a gas hot water heater so I can
finally take a shower. I had a nice long bath at the hotel Thursday night, but that was a LONG time ago. I linger in the hot shower as long as I can and then dry off and as fast and as thouroughly as I can. I cool off very quickly so I jump into jeans, a long sleeve tee shirt, a big sweat shirt, two pair of socks and hiking boots that are actually a half size too small. So far so good.
All I really want to do is go to sleep but I had forgotten we had a restaurant opening to go to in about an hour. So I simply sit in quiet for about 20 minutes until the boy and the hubby get home.
We ate a mediocre but free meal in a warm, nicely lit building and determined that the boy would go home and spend the night with mom & dad because though they didn't have power, they have a gas fireplace and it would keep their place warmer but the hubby and I would go home because limbs had started falling at our house and we wanted to be there if one fell and crashed trough the roof or something. What our being there actually accomplished, I'm not sure because if a limb fell through, it was going to fall through, with or without us. But at least we felt better being there. Did we really? I slept in two pair of pajamas and socks on my feet with the sheet, 4 blankets, the comforter and a stocking cap on my head.
Several fell and did damage while we were eating, but MOST of the damage was to the fence. Several BIG limbs fell on the fence in three different places, smashing it. One limb fell on the roof, breaking a couple of shingles and we're not sure what else it did because of all of the crap frozen to the roof.
One fell broken point through the seat of one of the patio chairs, another fell on the wood fence around the patio breaking a couple of the boards and several fell on the small wood fence around our a/c unit, knocking it apart but not breaking anything. I think it will simply need to be nailed back together. Then lots fell on the street so we were constantly pulling stuff out of the street so that the street wouldn't be blocked. Several homeowners just left theirs in the street until someone else cleared them, causing the road to be impassable.
We live on a corner and between our front and back yards we have four VERY LARGE, VERY OLD maple trees. I would guess them to be about 100 years old and 100 feet tall. In other word, big! I've got to say, big 100 year old, 100 foot trees that don't get pruned with lots of ice coating them make really scary noises before they drop branches on your head. First you hear this kind of rattling noise. Then you hear this really loud CRRAACCKKKK, then a whoosh and then a wham as then limb hits the ground. Hopefully, it didn't bring other limbs down with it. For a while, this was occuring in our yard alone at a rate of one every five minutes or so.
Combine that rate with the same rate for all of our neighbors and you might get some sense of how freaky it was. This lasted well into Sunday and slowed down considerably by Sunday evening. We didn't hear any when we came over to check the new damage on Monday morning. We have decided the no cracking thing is probably good. It tends to send people running. We hear however, wind is forcast. Up until now, there has been no wind to go along with this.
They still haven't announced when the funeral for my great uncle will be due to the fact the funeral in the small town near Anytown is without power. Ditto for the church and the cemetary is impassable. Wonderful! Does that mean they've just got him laying out frozen, by the back door?
Have taken everything out of the freezers, put it in coolers and put them on the front porch. Naturally, just before leaving for Chicago, I had gone to the store and gotten several (10 or so) frozen meals. That's not cheap. I had also just frozen all of the leftover ham and turkey from Christmas and we have some Omaha Steaks and three turkeys. It isn't supposed to get warm for quite some time. Which is a good thing since the turkeys are out swinging on the front porch swing!
It has gotten too cold for us to stay at our house. We must abandon it for mom & dad's and their fireplace. My candlescape in the woodburning (but useless for heat) fireplace has proven more useful for light than anything they have set up though. It has gotten down to 47 at our house. Wonder if the boy's frog and snails (at least his two fish have already died) will make it?
Prefer to stay in my own bed with my own stuff but the boy is having a blast. He thinks this is like camping. There was already no school for today due to Martin Luther King Day and even though my grandfather's dr's appointment was cancelled, I'm going to send him to day care anyway. He was signed up for it and because it is affiliated with the hospital, it will have lights, heat, warm food and other kids to play with. Besides, at noon, they announced no school for tomorrow as well.
Everyone has been pretty tense. We weren't sure we'd have power at work because it was off last night for about four hours. Luckily, it is back on. I think we're going to close early though. My cousin has no power and because they are on a well, that means they have no water either and no water means no flushing the toilet either. I have an employee from California who moved from Cali to Anytown to po-dunk and they live down a county road and are on a rural co-op electric and a well and have been using pond water to flush their toilets. She called in today and exclaimed "I didn't sign up for "Little House on the Prairie"!" I am really beginning to understand this. At least mom and dad and our house have hot and cold running water.
When another co-worker came in he told me that he heard Lowe's had
JUST gotten in a truckload of generators. A co-worker that knows a bit about generators went with me to pick one up. "No ma'am. We received a truckload early this morning and they were gone in a hour. We should be getting another one in the morning." We decided to try Home Depot for giggles. Walked in and the place was an absolute zoo. There were people milling around
EVERYWHERE. They were waiting for gas cans and extension cords and just about anything else you could imagine. We were about to leave when I heard an employee saying something about the truck had just arrived and it was full but he didn't know how many generators were actually on it.
My ears perked up. Generators? Just arrived? How do
I get one? I hear that you have to go to the service desk to get a number. I go to the service desk and wait in line. The service desk tells me they are no longer handing out numbers. I ask another woman and see a guy I went to college with asking the same question. Where do we go get in line and why can't we get another. "We don't know exactly how many we have on this truck but there are
at least as many as we handed out numbers. You two will be the first to get any additional we have and there is another truck following directly behind this truck."
Great! We get over to where we are supposed to stand in line. Not so great. There is a huge mass of humanity and they haven't started calling numbers yet. The last number I see is 199. It is at least an hour before they even begin calling numbers. People begin leaving. It begins to look at least a little promising. They start calling numbers. Just a few at a time. They get up to 31. then they go back to 13. What the....you've already called those. Things move a bit faster. Then they stop.
One of they local television stations is interviewing the store manager who is the guy calling the numbers. None of us in line care about this. We have no power, we can't see ourselves on television. Even if we had power, we probably wouldn't have cable, the lines are down, duh! Everyone starts to crowd forward. I find numbers on the floor. Two of them. They aren't great but they are numbers. 182 and 183. In an effort to be nice and to be fair, I offer 182 to the guy I know who is in front of me but supposedly without a number. He says thanks but that guy that left gave me his number, it was 96. He then turns and gives 182, that I gave him, to some random guy standing by him in line. I always knew I didn't like him and that he was a scumbag! If this random guy gets a generator and I don't, I will hunt scumbag down and attach his nuts to his generator!
Another hour goes by and they are to number 150. Things are definitely looking up. Looks like I might get one after all. I call dad. They've got generators, two sizes, do you want one? "I have no need for one." Oh well. I tried! Man, I'm tired. Tired of standing in line, tired to wondering, tired, tired of standing in general. 178, 179, 180. Am I going to get one? I look at my friend. We both look at the dwindling stack of generators. We smile because it looks like it. 181, 182, 183, 184, 185. Jackpot! Score!!!! I'm getting one baby! I tell them I want the BIG one. I call the hubby. Got one! I got the big one! "Why?" Seemed like a good idea at the time. Do you want the smaller one? Do you? Come one, I've got the big one on a cart and they've only got one little one left. It's now or never. "I'm thinking." "Go with the smaller one." My friend frowns at me. Hey, he doesn't think it's a good idea, especially if you think we want to continue and try to live essentially normal lives. "Okay, go for it and get the big one!"
When they first announced everything, they said they would put them on a cart for us and help us load them. All I can say is that it is a good thing my friend came with me because by the time I got mine paid for, they were out of gas cans, heavy duty extension cords and help. We loaded it by ourselves and that 8000kW generator is one heavy son of a gun.
By the time we ate dinner and got the thing home, it was too late to get much done with it that night. All we did was get it unloaded and some branches out of the road and clothes for the next day.
The hubby went into work early so that he could come home and get the generator set up. In either a stroke of genius of sheer stupidity, I say "since the power is out and we have the breaker box, why don't you switch out the fuse box for the breaker box while you are getting the generator set up."
He says to me "Why didn't you think of that sooner?" Huh? Did you even think of it at all? Of course not. So get off me! Fuses are a huge, gigantic pain in the ass. It will be a great thing! Naturally, it is a very time consuming thing. So, eivdently, is getting a generator ready to run a house. At least the way the hubby wants it to run a house.
Meanwhile, the outside temperature it getting colder and colder. The gas fireplace that is keeping things toasty at Mom and Dad's can't quite keep up. It is 57 downstairs at their house and 65 upstairs. Tuesday night we eat chinese take out upstairs. We are all beginning to run out of clothes and it is decided that mom, the boy and I will go do laundry at a laundromat the next afternoon since the hubby STILL doesn't have the house up and running.
All I can say about this event is blech and hopefully "never again in my lifetime"! I think everyone in Anytown had the same idea as we did and there are only a few laundromats that have power up and running. Keep in mind, I had been in Chicago when all of this started going down, so I hadn't done any laundry and had "trip laundry" to do, as did my dad. Due to the waiting time, mom couldn't stay and help me very long because she had to go over and relieve my aunt of "grandparent watch" at the hotel so that left me and the boy to contend with most of the laundry. We did at least three loads in triple capacity washers. Then had to wait turns for dryers. Again, about all I can say is blech, but at least we had clean clothes.
By Thursday evening, the hubby had the generator up and running enough to have the furnace and a few lights going and by Friday, we had all funcitons with the exception of the range and the washer and dryer. He is convinced that we could have run those as well, but I really wasn't willing to tempt fate at that time. Keep in mind folks, by this time, we are going on day 7 of no real power.
This means that the refrigerator has to be cleaned and disenfected so that we can begin using it again. Even though I had taken most things out, I did not remove EVERYTHING and the "powers that be" say that it needs to be cleaned and disenfected with a bleach solution. That's fun, NOT!!! Have to do the same thing to the freezer side. Tell the hubby that since the deep freeze and the small fridge are in "the garage," he has to do them. He agrees that "he'll get around to them". Yah right! by Easter, maybe.
Friday and Saturday come and go with no real changes other than mom and dad getting their power back on late Friday evening. No power for a full week. We see crews from our local utility company out and about along with crews from tree services and power companies from across the country. We talked we guys from Tennessee, South Dakota, Lousiana and Indiana, just to name a few. Many of them working like hell from sunup til sundown without breaks, trying to get power back on, trees out of the road and people's houses restore some semblance of normalcy to our lives, as quickly as they humanly could. It was so refreshing and strangly comforting to see. Many of them expressed their amazement at how kind and friendly the people here were to them. They were surprised that people weren't yelling at them and demanding that they "fix their problems right now" and didn't have the "woe is me, we're victims, you gotta help me" attitudes. Hey what can I say, we do it ourselves and help our neighbors who can't do for themselves. That's the way we do it in this part of the planet!
Sunday rolled around and wasn't appearing to be any different than any of the previous nine days. The hubby's youngest brother drove down to help cut up some of our massive pile of branches and though he, the hubby, my dad and myself worked on it for at least 5 hours straight, it barely looked like we put a dent in any of the stacks. What a mess. Some people in a minivan stopped and asked if they could take some of the wood we had cut up. We told them sure, as long as they gather from what we hadn't neatly stacked yet. They were cool with that offer. By this time, we had a stacked pile six feet high and at least 10 feet long. There was still tons left to cut up, this was just from part of the front yard, we hadn't even touched the back.
The city hired contractors to come by either two or three different times and collect limbs in all the city's neighborhoods. All a person had to do was drag them to the curb. There were those that didn't even get that done, but most of us did. My cousin who lives on three acres in the freakin' middle of nowhere wanted some of the "cut timber" for bonfires. We were more than happy to oblige, he just had to come get itl. That still left a bunch for the city.
As we were working Sunday afternoon, we saw a bunch of the different work groups' trucks in the neighborhood. One finally stopped in front of our house and several guys got out. I sent the hubby over to chat with them because it looked like one of the tree teams and they were headed to our back yard. We had no trees with limbs on lines in the back yard. None of the big trees in the back was near power lines so I was concerned. Evidently, they were using our yard to access the neighbor's. Evidently they were also a precursor to the power line teams. Could, should I even get my hopes up? No, probably not! I'll just go back to loading limbs into the wheelbarrow.
I took my father over to his house to pick something up and when we returned to my house at about 4:00pm, lo and behold, we have power. This is now nine full days. That is a VERY long time. I did a happy dance, as did the boy. All the things you take for granted. Wow, what a nightmare. And though the rest of the neighbourhood had power, the house across the driveway from us still does not because, the utility company claims, their weatherhead is too bent. But not any more bent than it was the last time the utility company was there and replace the line from their house to the pole. As a matter of fact, when they got the bent weatherhead fixed and the utilities came out to re-attach the line, the line was too short because it had further to travel from the pole to the straight weatherhead. Doh!
I will learn Monday morning I have several employees without power. One, who lives near me, has the same problem as the neighbor with a damaged weatherhead and another has some problems due to a major line running through his neighborbood VERY near his house being down. They are both restored within the week, though.
What an auspicious beginning to the year. Is it an omen, a sign? Can it only get better from here? Or is this just a sign of things to come? I promise to try to post more frequently and to keep you, dear reader, on the edge of your seat! lol
