Ah, Valentine’s Day. We never plan anything momentous; we sometimes try to do something nice, like some special chocolates or a nice dinner, but that’s about it. Otherwise we try to avoid the stress of worrying about it. Yesterday… yesterday was interesting.
Technorati Tags: Valentine’s Day
We’d actually planned to make a nice dinner. There’s a butcher not too far away that sells dry-aged beef, so we were going to have steak and bread pudding and the like. But bright and early, around 6 am–just as I was finishing my shower in fact–the power went out.
I distinctly remember saying I missed snow. Snow, not ice. The ice storm and winds combined to bring down power to the homes of about 70,000 people–yes, seventy THOUSAND–in our county, and the county was going to so far as to set up shelters. Usually we get power back fairly quickly, and it wasn’t until about 4 pm that we found out how widespread the problems were, so we didn’t think to pick up wood for the fireplace until then. I think we might have gotten the last four bags of kindling left in the county.
We had an early dinner at a Mexican restaurant that still had power, and got a roaring fire going in the fireplace, which at least made it comfortable to sit right there, even though it did nothing for the rest of the house. The temperature in the house was already down to the mid-fifties, and we knew it could easily be another day or two until we had power, depending on how things went. Since we draw water from an aquifer via a well pump we also had no running water. We were starting to think that we might have to try to find a hotel that had vacancies and would be willing to take the cats; certainly if we didn’t have power today we’d have been looking at that.
Thankfully, however, power came back on around 8 pm. Our suspicion is that the high school one street over gives this power block a higher priority than some, and we aren’t about to complain!
Maybe we can try again to have that dinner sometime between today and this weekend. At least I got the third book in the Feline Breeds trilogy read yesterday, so I’ll review that soon, and I’ve started in on the Deluxe Edition of the 2007 Writer’s Market for review.
“My undead just /cannibalized your honor student”
Hope the power stays up!
So far so good! It flickered a few times last night but otherwise has stayed strong. Yay!