In reflecting on the crazy storm-conditions that have left much of this region still without power, I thought I’d reflect on how our family dealt with it.
Thursday, December 14th
I left work at my normal time; it had been raining earlier, but I wasn’t aware of how bad it had gotten until I stepped outside. Back when I lived in
I got home and found that nearly everything in my sling-pack was wet, though my book, wedged as it was between some other stuff, managed to avoid the same horrible fate. My sneakers are toast. It’s impossible to bathe average-quality footwear in road-puddle and salvage it.
At home, Adam was (of course) wildly excited by the whole prospect. The following day was to be his last day of school before Christmas break anyway so he wasn’t excited a-la a snow day. It was just the craziness of the wind, the intensity of the rain; I’m quite certain he’s never seen such a thing as that before.
Late in the evening, the power goes out (I had the foresight to have us shut down our computers). That’s about as good a time as any to get ready for bed.
Friday, December 15th
The morning comes and a weak alarm emits from our goofy bedside clock (I never heard it), but the catch is that it wasn’t showing a time and as alluded to, didn’t make the same sound. Yeah, the power is still out.
A look outside reveals the chaos wrought by the storm. There’s debris everywhere and since our little area between Bothell and Woodinville is essentially a developed swamp, much of the roads still have little mini-lakes in them. There’s only one thing to do at a time like this: lounge in bed and not open the damned refrigerator.
Mid-morning I decide to make a run to some sort of Starbucks that’s open. This meant a trip to Mill Creek since, in a rare occurrence, many Seattle-area Starbucks are closed. Contrary to popular belief, their employees are not grown and maintained on the premises. When I get there, though, the line to get coffee had snaked through the store and down the beer aisle. To hell with this… I got a box of crappy Hostess donuts (that’s all that was left) and left.
After our nutritious breakfast of donut-matter, we lounge some more. Later in the day, we drop Adam off at Papa Ted’s and they all entertain themselves with movies while we keep ourselves busy. They were also kind enough to let us bathe since they had power and nice, warm water. A thought occurs at this time: we’re supposed to have a dinner party this evening but with no power comes no party. We don’t exactly love entertaining our friends in the dark so we must cancel. We headed to Red Robin to take the last free table in the bar area and ordered a whole bunch of food that wasn’t so good for us, but boy did it taste good. You can’t go wrong with a giant tower of onion rings, though Angela will argue that point with me…
When we returned home, we moved as much of the refrigerator’s contents as we could and put them in bags on our outside porch, since we reasoned it was far colder outside than in the fridge at that point.
The rest of the evening was very nice under the darkened circumstances. The two of us enjoyed a few drinks and talked for many hours before retiring for the evening. Later in the evening, we were jolted awake by the sounds and sights of our lights turning on, the printer gaining power, and the fridge humming to life. Woohoo! We got power back! Five minutes later, it went dead.
After a little cursing, we drifted off to almost-sleep before (about twenty minutes later) the power came back and stayed on this time.
Saturday, December 16th
Mid morning, we picked up Adam and attempted a trip to the market to get a few things we need. We visited the Mill Creek Central Market and bought some yummy food for the coming week. Instead of risking another gastrointestinal adventure at another burger-joint, we all had some fresh soup from the market and ate it at the tables outside.
Later on, we passed Adam off to
A bit before this, I had left and acquired our new multifunction printer from Staples, fixed the wireless network (thanks so much to Coni, who gave us the cash to do it – Merry Christmas to you as well). Angela and I later readied ourselves for our trip to Pam and Steve’s to enjoy some spare-ribs, carrots, and some salad. It was topped by a brownie-concoction of Steve’s that was quite tasty.
Sunday, December 17th
This day saw me reflect on our good fortune to have power since much of the area was still without power at this time. Angela left home to go study at a Starbucks, received Adam and returned later. I, on the other hand, managed to fix our finicky wireless network and get the printer working on our main computers. The day was spent mildly relaxing, performing hardware and software tweaks on the computers and a little light net-surfing (oh internet, how did I live without you for more than 24 hours?). Angela will likely roll her eyes at that parenthesized text…
So that’s how we coped with the outages, with the exception of some omitted details. We fared better than many. As of this writing, many people in our area are still without power. Now, I’ll slap a “the end” on this thing with a quick note here of a representational article regarding our fifth day in the post-regional-power situation.
Comments:
kga245 (December 20, 2006. 08:19pm)
Wow, it has been snowing a hell of a lot up there, hasn't it? I remember your story from the Monday snowfall from a few weeks ago. I was reading it while I was in New York. I was in a hotel and watched the Monday Night Football game when the Seahawks delayed the game because of the snow and rain. Then I read your story. It made me feel like the world, in spite of it being large, cold and more powerful than is sometimes healthy, is also a cozy, small, welcoming place. That's the sentimental storyteller in me talking. Thanks for sharing.