When the Weather Outside is Frightful

Sorry for the delay in posting. Here in our town, Jack Frost has been playing some mean tricks on us over the past four days. A huge ice storm rolled into the city Sunday night...and again Monday night.....and then it rained all day Tuesday. And then it got really cold again. And then that rain became ice.
All the ice has knocked down trees and power lines all over. It looks like a war zone here, with trees flattened all over the roads and cars smashed in from all the falling trees. On the news this morning, they said that 1/3 of everyone in the state is without power right now, and about 1/2 of people in the metro area where we live don't have power right now either. It may be another week or more before they get things fully restored.
We've been really, really lucky. We only lost our power for about 12 hours, just long enough for me to realize that I depend on the internet and TV way, way, way too much. We have been blessed enough to be able to turn our house into a refugee camp for two friends and an aunt and a cousin and three canines. What with all the extra canine attention, Riley will never be satisfied with boring old me ever again. I realized though, that we need to focus on helping him learn to share a little more, because he was fighting over toys with the DOGS. And by fighting with, I mean mostly shooting them occasional dirty glances and scurrying away to hide his toys in odd places because he was worried the dogs were going to steal them.
Yesterday morning, I went to the store to buy milk and eggs and some fresh produce. This is what I came home with:

Things are so drastic that the Wal-Mart near our house has acutally closed its doors. And many of the other stores have had their power off for so long that they are just carting away all the milk, eggs, produce, and thawed meat and throwing it away. There have been long lines at the working gas stations and restaurants with power and a rash of buglaries in homes with dead alarm systems. Don't worry about us though--my cousin found a grocery store across town with milk and actual groceries of the uncanned variety, and our freezer is stocked full of meat. We are all safe and just as warm and well-fed as ever. Not everyone is quite as lucky as us though.

One good thing about this: A small portion of Sam's final exam was actually CANCELLED because his school is without power. All the lovely corpses in the refrigerated anatomy lab that students were going to use for their final are now, well, a little on the not-so-fresh side. Good news if you're a med school student, bad news if you donated your body to science.


This was the view outside our back window Monday morning.


Our poor tree.

Tree branch on our power line... Anyone out there smart enough to know if it will be safe for us to remove this ourselves? I never paid attention during those public service announcement, "never fly your kite near a power line" commercials.