Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Power Pout-age

First things first: yes, we're still without power at our house after a huge ice storm covered the northern half of Oklahoma (sic). We and 186,000 other Tulsans, as of 5:30 this afternoon, are still in the dark.

Just now I called to report the outage again (as instructed by PSO on TV) and the estimate for restoring power in my area is midnight on December 18.

As in SEVEN days from now.

Thank goodness for Hometown and a very welcoming mom.

The boys think they are on the neverending vacation. This all started on Sunday morning, and for three days (or was it 10?) we stayed at various friends' homes who had power and spent one night in our house with the fake/realistic gas logs blazing all night. Mickey was thrilled to get out his bean bag (sleeping bag) and off to sleep he went. Alex was thrilled to sleep with mom and dad once again. I was thrilled to wake up four times in the night with pain in my backside, since that meant I had not died from carbon monoxide poisoning. Pete, uh, was not thrilled about anything.

As for damage to our house, our wedding gift of a patio table and chairs is demolished. The chairs are bent at the "waist" from the impact of the very large limbs that fell. Sort of weird, though, the glass tabletop survived unscathed, more or less... Other than that, we could not see any damage. Except if that power pole has fallen behind our house since we left, then things could be ugly.

The whole thing has been very inconvenient, but through all of it the streets have not been iced over. The biggest problem has been navigating a clear route through the neighborhoods. Grocery stores are CRAZY. I was in a very large one Monday night trying (in vain) to find "D" batteries, and the lights just went out. All the way. Audible gasps everywhere, and then the generators kicked on. And I kicked it out the door.

I've got plenty of pictures on my camera but have to get them loaded on mom's computer somehow. I hope soon but no promises.

The good news? Hometown has a couple of very nice Christmas light displays that have my boys totally enthralled. We've already driven through one of them twice, and this is only our second night here. Pretty soon I'll just hand Mickey the keys and say "be home by eight..."

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