So I am back. Thank you so much for your well wishes and for hanging in there. I don't think I have ever been away from this space for so long. I missed "hanging out" with y'all.
Let's see. It all started with Freaktober N'oreaster. I am so weary of it, I probably won't go into all of the graphic detail here-sparing you and me. It's still kind of a long story so thanks for hanging in with me. Anyway, I was in my studio on Halloween Weekend feverishly trying to get work done for Open Studio. Usually I sit these storms out at home. When I started hearing branches pop all over the place and the thunder increase in intensity, I decided to call it a day. Good thing I did, because that storm wreaked all kinds of crazy havoc.
The heavy wet snow and accompanying winds ripped some siding and wires off of our house. Man we really need to change that paint color.
We lost power that night. I thought we were going to sail through, but then I heard the muffled explosion. When I saw downed lines in the street, I called the police department. The dispatcher told me there were downed lines on every street in our town. We were out of power from that Saturday until nine days-count 'em-nine days later. I could not believe it. At some points during the outage, it was 43 degrees in the house.
Luckily we were able to save our food. Greg had the great idea of packing snow into the coolers and then putting the coolers under the house. Our deep freezer stayed frozen. We were very lucky. People and businesses lost all kinds of food. Families stayed in hotels for days on end. It is heartbreaking. Some people lost their cars, had parts of their house destroyed and some even lost their lives. We are very fortunate.
We managed to score a generator in Massachusetts- it's called THE STORM RESPONDER and it deserves every one of those capital letters. We stayed with my mom a few days, cleaned up our house a lot, bonded more with our neighbors, got way behind in our work, and all kinds of tasks. The children were out of school for seven days. At first Doran had a very hard time with the sudden break in routine. He was a trooper and actually did very well a few days into it. During the worst of the outage, there were live wires were melting asphalt, fallen transfomers leaking oil into the ground, and trees were coming down all over the place. The town cancelled Halloween-twice.
There are still dangling wires (dead ones), tree branches, and debris all over the state. We still have an old telephone wire drooping in our driveway. The cable company left it hanging after they repaired the other wire. I hit it about every time I pull into our driveway. I need to call them about that.
If you look closely you can see a sign to CL&P. As day 5 without power rolled around, pitiful handmade signs popped up in a lot of neighborhoods. One even said, "CL&P please don't forget us." We didn't see a power crew or even survey crew in our neighborhood until day 7.
So now CL&P (our electric supplier) will hopefully have to do some reorganizing. We are so grateful for the linemen and women and for all of the crews that left their homes in other states to help our pitiful butts. I can't say that many of us have the same affection for the high level execs at CL&P. I mean does one dude really need to make millions, especially when the company keeps mishandling storm responses (see Hurricane Irene, ice storm of 2008) while the companies in our sister state of Massachusetts don't. I don't know the exact salary the CL &P president makes because the company used a loophole that would allow it to not disclose its executive salaries. Nicely done. We pay the second highest utility rates in the country, one would think they would have more shame. But no, for days the company did not communicate with our mayor. He then sent the police out to talk to the linemen to see where they had been working and where they were going next. When CL&P found out the crews had been talking to the police, they forbade the crews to talk to them. Amazing.
Snow and wind did this.
However, despite all of this, we were very, very lucky. We and all of our friends and family are safe. We were lucky to have the family resources that we have and to be able to stretch our financial resources farther (as painful as it was) to purchase a generator. I think my credit card went up in flames when we bought it. We never spend that much money at once.
We are lucky we don't live with cold, hunger and so much uncertainty every day like so many people in our town, state, country and world do. That is a gift indeed.
It's good to "see" you again friends. I'll be back tomorrow for Yarn Along. Yay normalcy!
