No Power

Woke up this morning to the house literally shaking! I was a little lost and loopy and wondered downstairs to check weather.com. No tornado....so just a massive thunderstorm. So massive that we lost power within minutes of it hitting. We had 70 mph winds! It was all over and done with pretty quickly...an hour to an hour and a half maybe? When it was over, it was just eerie quiet... so we weren't sure if it was OVER over. But it was :). No power. I never really realized how much we depend on electricity! Not just us in our home, but people in general.

We spent the morning chatting with neighbors outside and the kids helped them clean up their "debris." we didn't have any really (thank good ness). Our neighbor lost their tree! After that I took the kids to Mcdonalds for lunch (10 minutes away). Nearly an hour later we passed Mcdonalds and continued on... NO POWER ANYWHERE!! No stoplights. No restaurants. 6 flags was even shut down! In fact people were "tailgating" in all the parking lots near 6 flags since their plans for the day were ruined. Trees were down everywhere! We went over quite a few power lines... Everything was closed...so after making one giant loop (to check if anything else was open), we returned home... nearly 2 hours later. The nice thing...Tabitha fell asleep and then slept for another hour+ when we got home :)

My neighbors got a generator and graciously took our frozen good and charged my laptop and phone for me! I will never go to bed again without charging those!!! As I'm handing over my food, I thought "isn't this what I'm Supposed to be doing for others? I am NOT prepared for natural disasters!" I wish I had some MRE's!!!! (meals ready to eat--military!)

We finally heard that one side of the town was good, so later we made it over to Target and the kids got an icee and I got lunchables for their dinner... when Svend got home we went to the mall for ours.

The kids asked (well, BERGEN) every 30 minutes if we could watch a movie. At one point Tally went in the garage to get her bike...no power to open the garage door! I opened for her and she calmed down a bit (she was pretty moody with no power!). Our pool was even closed! I'm assuming because you need power to open the gate?

We got home from the mall to darkness. It's wierd driving down the road and seeing sheer blackness when you know there should be lights. I started lighting candles. Just as we got them all lit, POWER!!! WAHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Some of our friends aren't so fortunate... they are saying 4pm tomorrow!!! I'm glad we've got it now...we're starting to smell like we've been camping!