Author Archives: Cindy

by the power of GraySkull, we have The POOOWWWEEERR!!!

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Apologies for the “He-Man” reference, but that is just how excited I am to finally have my electricity back.  

Lesson learned: the next time we have some sort of weather crisis, I apparently just need to get my sister on a plane. I’m not kidding, five minutes before she got to our house, the utility crews showed up on our street. Nine days with no electricity, and they finally got to our neighborhood.

To give you an idea of just how “in the boonies” we really are: our utility company’s website bragged this morning that they had successfully restored power to 96% of the people who lost power from the windstorm. We’re the last four percent, folks. That’s just pathetic.

After she got here, T and I walked up and down the street handing out York peppermint patties to all of the workers. Don’t laugh, it’s all I had. Everything in my fridge and freezer is trashed, and that is literally the only “festive holiday treat” that I had in the house. I offered to go down the street to fetch Starbucks for all of them, but they said they were fine.

An hour or so later, the utility truck was in our driveway. I asked the foreman how much longer until we had our power back, and he said that he estimated about an hour or so. I almost burst into tears of joy. Instead, I just hugged him. No kidding. My sister went back inside to warn Dave that I was hugging random utility workers. Dave promptly came out to restrain me and bring me back in the house.

Sure enough, about an hour later, our entire neighborhood had their electricity turned back on.

I would try to think of a way to describe exactly how happy this makes me, or something profound about how I learned that I am a stronger person than I thought I was by surviving this way for over a week (and pregnant! Bonus suffering points for pregnant!). But honestly, it just occurred to me that I can finally take a shower in a bathroom with working lightbulbs – as opposed to candles – so I’m afraid that I am outta here.

Hope y’all have a lovely, warm, well-illuminated Christmas.

ready to scream

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Lest anyone think that everything is all hunky-dory in our part of the world (ha! ha, ha!), here’s the latest:

1. My family will all be on their respective airplanes, heading toward Seattle, in approximately 12 hours.

2. We still have no electricity.

You have no idea how badly I wish I could drink right now. I know pregnant women are permitted to have the occasional glass of wine, but since I don’t like wine, that doesn’t help me very much. Can anyone dig up some fetal health benefits of vodka? If I mix it with cranberry juice, it would be good for my kidneys, right? Anyone?

Sigh.

The good news is that we’re hearing stories of people in Duvall (the town we live in) getting their electricity back today. So at least it’s getting closer to us? I hope?

For the record, we originally lost our power on Thursday, December 14th. It is now almost Friday, December 22nd. That means we’re going into Day Nine. Holy god.

Oh, and here’s another important life lesson which I can thank my sister for: did you know that dry cleaners will do your regular laundry for you? I guess this is something she’s picked up living in Manhattan, but I had no idea that it was universally true. But apparently it is, and Dave and I now have clean clothes for about the same cost that it would’ve been to haul all of it to a coin-op laundromat and do it myself. So that’s awesome.

One of our friends, who lives in town (and by “in town,” I mean within the city limits of Duvall, as opposed to the unincorporated part like us), stopped by tonight to drop off our Christmas card in person, and to check to see if we had our power back yet. (She had just gotten hers back on.) As luck would have it, she’s a real estate agent, so I told her all about my plans to move to the suburbs as soon as it’s feasibly possible. Moving isn’t really an option right now, but it could potentially happen later this year (maybe in the summer), so she and I are going to sit down in a few months and have a serious talk about that.

I’m not kidding, I don’t think I can deal with another winter in this house.

still not good, but better

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I think I’ve at least somewhat recovered from my little meltdown yesterday. We still don’t have power, but I’m not feeling quite as fragile and on the verge of tears about everything today. Just so I’m not terminally whiny, here’s some good news:

* The hospital tour is over. I don’t know why I thought it would help alleviate some of my anxiety about childbirth, because being in one of those birthing suites only made me feel like I was going to faint. (It’s a very nice hospital, but still, it’s just the idea of what I’ll be doing there that scares me.) Maybe it’ll help when the time comes, to know what everything will look like when I arrive at the hospital in labor, and it won’t all be so new and foreign. But for now, seeing the room and realizing that I’m going to be using it in about a month or so honestly just scared the crap out of me. I’m not sure that I’d recommend it to a first-time mom.

* The ultrasound today was good, and I’m really looking forward to getting our power back so I can scan the photos. Baby Girl is in the 45th percentile for size and weight, which is good. As my doctor pointed out, I really don’t want to give birth to a 12-pound baby, so not being in the 90th percentile is just fine and dandy. I’ll take that average size measurement without complaint.

Also? Baby Girl has got a serious kisser on her. Dave and I both have pretty full lips, so I’m not sure whose DNA that is, but it looks like we’re going to have a little Angelina Jolie on our hands. Dave says we could just stick her to the windshield and let her lips act as a suction cup. Maybe we’ll just tell people that we had the pediatrician give her collagen injections. Hee.

* When we got back from the doctor’s office, and I felt like I had been run over by a steam roller and had to lie down for an hour? My wonderful, darling, amazing husband tidied up the kitchen and living room for me.

I don’t know if I’ve sufficiently given Dave credit for how awesome he’s been during this past week, but seriously, he has rocked the house in a big way. I’m not used to feeling so feeble and weak all the time, and it’s not easy for me to admit it when I physically can’t do something. (Especially when it’s something easy that I should be able to do, like drive two miles down the street to pick up sandwiches for lunch.) He’s just taken over and made this all so much easier on me, and I cannot begin to express how grateful I am for it.

* My family is booked at a hotel for both Friday and Saturday nights, and my sister is renting a car, which will save me a whole lot of headaches. (Like the 25-mile trip to the airport, for example, which I was going to have to do twice on Friday. As she has done so many times in the past, my sister has saved my butt yet again.) I’m hoping that we’ll have our power back soon, so we can have the whole family here on Christmas Eve (Sunday), but we’ll do what we have to do.

My family is another one that deserves a big shout-out, because they’ve all been so understanding of how emotional I’ve been feeling lately, and they haven’t complained once about the last-minute adjustment to their holiday plans, or how it’s going to suck that they have to pay for a hotel in addition to all of their other travel expenses, or any of that. (Well, my dad might gripe about the hotel. But my mom has already assured me that if he says one word about it, they will all jump down his throat before his words ever reach my delicate little ears.)

* I was able to take a hot shower last night. Yes, the water was brownish – not that I could tell since the only light in the bathroom was candlelight. (Trust me, it’s not nearly as sexy and romantic as it sounds.) But it’s funny how something as simple as being able to attend to your personal hygiene can make the world feel like a nicer place.

* I read online today that the next town over from us (Carnation: home of the milk of the same name, for those of you who like random bits of trivia) got their power back yesterday. That means it’s getting closer and closer. I’m hoping, praying, crossing my fingers, and making wishes on pennies/stars/whatever I can find that we’ll get ours tomorrow. You guys all do the same for me, ok?

a list: things I am not coping very well with right now

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1. Still no bloody power.

2. Hospital tour tonight.

3. Ultrasound tomorrow morning.

4. The fact that we have water (because my brilliant husband got our well’s pump working), but that it’s brown. REALLY brown. I’m thanking my lucky stars that we got a water filter installed in our kitchen sink last week. I’m still not huge on the idea of showering in that stuff, though.

5. My entire family (mom, dad, brother, sister) will be arriving on Friday. As in four days from now. See #1 as for why this is a problem. It’s looking like they’re going to be spending Christmas in a hotel, which they’re all fine with, but I hate it.  

6. This sentence, which Dave said to me on at least three separate occasions yesterday: “Ok, I’m going outside to work on the generator. If you hear a loud bang, don’t worry because I’m nowhere near it.” I spent the next several minutes with my cell phone in hand, waiting for any loud-ish type noise to trigger the 911 call.

7. That I have no. energy. whatsoever. I usually think of myself as pretty tough in a crisis situation, but I am just not doing well with this whole disaster scenario at all.

8. To follow up on my lack-of-toughness in this crisis? I read this on our utility company’s website this morning, and promptly fell into a puddle of huge, heaving sobs:

Carnation, Duvall, Fall City, Snoqualmie and North Bend areas

The North Bend, Snoqualmie, and Snoqualmie Valley areas were among those hardest hit within our service area. Work is focused on restoring the high-voltage transmission grid and the substations that feed electricity to local neighborhoods. We hope to have our substations in these areas re-energized by midweek. Once this work is complete, we can concentrate solely on repairing the local distribution lines that serve customers. Restoration work in the heavily damaged Snoqualmie Valley will continue through the weekend.

Yeah, that Snoqualmie Valley area where the work will be continuing through the weekend? That’s us. And that’s really all I can say about that. Merry flippin’ Christmas to us.

realizing I couldn't have survived a hundred years ago

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Ok, since that last post was written on Friday night, I guess I need to finish up the remainder of our weekend:

Saturday: After freezing my butt off all night and running outside to fill a bucket with water to force the toilets to flush manually (thank God we are lazy people and never put our wheelbarrow away, because I don’t know where I would’ve gotten all that water otherwise), I decided that this whole “roughing it” business was not for me. Dave’s plane was due to arrive around 11 a.m. In the meantime, I got up, packed a suitcase, made sure there was tons of food and water available for the cats, and started calling hotels to try to find us a place to stay for a night. Or two.

It’s worth noting that in a situation such as this, calling hotels.com‘s 800 number is totally freakin’ useless. The first person spoke so little English that I got frustrated, hung up on the poor guy, and tried calling back to see if I’d have better luck with another operator. (I know it’s rude, but the guy just couldn’t understand that I wanted suburbs of Seattle, not specific neighborhoods in the city. I’d say “Bellevue or Redmond,” and he’d say, “Belltown, yes?” Um, no. Not the same thing at all, dude.) I did have better luck with the second operator, but then she booked us at a hotel that still didn’t have their damn electricity back yet, so that didn’t do us a fat lot of good either.

Meanwhile, Dave and I had talked on the phone and agreed to meet up at the hotel, since we were coming from different directions. (Me from our house, him from the airport.) We got there, found out the place had no power, and decided to take a leap of faith and drive to the hotel we stayed at when we got flooded out and couldn’t get home last month. And once again, the lovely Indian ladies took one look at me and were all like, “You’re expecting? Oh, you poor thing. Here’s the king suite. We’ll give it to you for half price.” (I’m not kidding. Love. Them.)

At least this time I was able to pack ahead, unlike when we were stranded and couldn’t get home. I even put my body pillow in a hefty bag and dragged it along with me, because lord help me, I cannot sleep without it at this point. We managed to find some places around here that were open so we were actually able to get some hot food, and we were both sound asleep before 9 p.m.

Sunday: Not such a good day for me, emotionally. I was ok until I checked our utility company’s website, and saw that our town is listed as one that will remain without power “throughout Monday and likely longer,” due to some extensive structural damage to their transmission system. I’m trying to hold out a tiny ray of hope that maybe we’ll get ours back sooner rather than later, since we live in the unincorporated part of Duvall, and there have been times when the entire city lost power, and we were just fine. So maybe that means we’re on a different circuit? Or that our power comes from a different transmission system (maybe one that isn’t so “structurally damaged”)? Who knows, but it’s what I’m hoping.

In the afternoon, we went back to the house to check on the cats. [Side note: when Dave went into the garage and told me that everything in the freezer had thawed – the dishes I had pre-made for Christmas, the meals I had prepared and frozen for after the baby arrives, everything – and that it was all going to have to be thrown out? It took everything in me not to burst into tears on the spot. I knew everything in the fridge and the indoor freezer was a loss, but I had been hoping that the garage freezer would be ok because it’s been so cold outside. Sadly, that isn’t the case.] The kitties seemed to be coping ok, although I worry a lot about Teenie, just because she’s old and has always been an indoor cat. Dave’s cats occasionally stay outside overnight, so they’re a bit more used to braving the elements than she is. I seriously contemplated sneaking just Teenie back to the hotel room with me. But alas, my husband, he had a plan… 

Since I was feeling a tad emotional (read: cranky, tired and weepy), I came back to the hotel while Dave set off to gather the necessary supplies to rig our circuit breaker to our generator. I still don’t understand what his plan was exactly, but he promised that we would have heat, water and lights, which is a heck of a lot more than I was able to get the generator to do. (One lamp and the Internet router. Go me!) It’s funny, I always forget that Dave has a degree in electrical engineering until stuff like this happens and then he goes into Boy Mode and is all, “Ok, so I just need some electrical tape and a soldering iron, and then I can blah-blah-blah…” (Note: he never actually says “blah-blah-blah,” but that’s what it sounds like to my totally confused ears. He might as well be one of Charlie Brown’s teachers with the “wa-waaa-wa-waa” stuff.) Yes, ladies, apparently I married my own little McGuyver. Sorry, he’s taken.

There is the issue that whatever he does might not be exactly legal or up to certain county-regulated code standards. But I don’t think we have to worry about that until we decide to sell our house. (And my god, I do hope that day is fast approaching, because I’m not sure how much more of this “country life” crap I can stand.) Meanwhile, nobody call the authorities on us, ok? Desperate times, desperate measures, all of that, yes?

As soon as I got back to our hotel room, I crawled into the bathtub and stayed there until I got prune-y. (Baths are kind of fun these days. I can just lie back and watch my belly make involuntary movements when the baby flops around. Totally creepy and alien, but cool at the same time.) After that, I was a little calmer – at least, I didn’t feel like I was about to burst into tears at any moment, so that’s good. We’ll see how well I do when it’s time to clean out the freezer.

At 10 p.m., Dave called to say that he had the water and the lights going, but not the heat. He said that he would keep working on it if I really wanted to come home that night, but he sounded so exhausted, and he’d been working on it for hours. I told him to just go to bed (because he apparently doesn’t mind sleeping in the freezing cold), and that I’d stay at the hotel by myself. I mean, what the hell, we’d already paid for the room and it was too late to check out and get any of our money back, so I figured I might as well stay where it’s cozy and warm (albeit husband-less, which sucks).

Monday: Dave got the furnace hooked up to the generator late last night, so I checked out of the hotel and came home this morning. It’s already warmed up from 37 degrees inside the house to a balmy 52, so I’m optimistic that I might be able to take my coat and gloves off at some point in the next few hours. Here’s hoping.

another edited timestamp post

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Sorry for the delay in getting these online, but you wouldn’t believe the last 48 hours we’ve had. More updates to come too!  

It’s funny that I wrote the title for that last post at the time that I wrote it (Thursday night), because I assumed (since I had no TV or Internet access) that the storm was only affecting us out in the boonies. As it turns out, not so much. There are close to a million people in this area who still don’t have electricity tonight, and it just happens that our happy little home is one of them.

Last night was quite possibly one of the scariest nights of my life. Even in a house as solid as ours, 70 mph winds make the entire house (including our bed) shake, and every time I heard some unknown noise, I was convinced that it was someone in the house. Who on earth would go out looking for rape or murder victims in the middle of massive windstorm? I have no idea. But I was sure he knew that I was alone in the house. So even with the benefit of Unisom, I didn’t exactly have what one might call a restful night’s sleep. I was more in a drugged state of panic for hours on end.
 
This morning I got up and checked out the damage. There are branches everywhere. A tree in our front yard came down and took out part of our fence (that’ll be a fun expense). There was this big white metal thing in our front yard, and I couldn’t figure out what it was, until I saw that Carol (our across-the-street neighbor) had her entire fence taken out. Then I remembered that she had a little shelter for her horses in her yard (sort of a metal framed carport-style thing with a canvas roof), so that solved the mystery of the big pile of metal in our yard. Apparently when it came rolling out of her yard and into ours, it took out our mailbox. Carol was very apologetic about it, and said that she’d pay for the mailbox, but seriously, if she hadn’t said anything, I would’ve just thought it was the wind that had done it.

I drove all over the Eastside today looking for what, I’m not exactly sure. At first I thought I’d just find a Starbucks, get online for a while, charge my cell phone, and head back home. I quickly realized that every retail establishment imaginable was closed, because no one had electricity. I stopped at a hardware store to see if they had any regular old-fashioned phones (you know, so I could just plug it into the wall and have a dial tone? Instead of stupid cordless phones which need electricity to work?), but they were sold out. I managed to play the “I’m 8 1/2 months pregnant” card so they’d feel sorry for me and let me use their restroom. (There were 2 candles on the counter. The guy handed me a flashlight on my way in. Lovely.) I did manage to find one store that was running on generator power, and they happened to have a car charger for my particular model of cell phone, which made me ecstatically happy. That’s the best $7 I’ve spent all year. 

Finally, I gave up and headed home. Carol, the lovely across-the-street neighbor (oh she who has helped me break into my own home before) came over and helped me start our generator, which I didn’t know how to do because that’s always been Dave’s job. (Figures that the one time I really need him for something like this, he’s in another state, hmm?)

With the generator running, I was able to get online for a little while and get that last blog post up. The generator has since run out of gas, so I’m back to typing in the dark with the laptop on battery power. It appears that the wind took out a lot of cell phone towers in the area, so my one source of communication is pretty flaky. Oh, and the stupid, stupid well – our home’s source of water, which I hate with every fiber of my being – apparently runs on electricity too. So I have no tap water, and I can’t flush the toilets. Niiiiice. 

Just about the only good bit of news that I’ve heard all day (oh yeah, forgot to mention this earlier) is that DAVE GOT THE JOB!!! Which is awesome-awesome-awesome, and I’ll fill in more of those details when he gets home tomorrow and I can talk to him for more than 30 seconds without my cell phone signal breaking up.

For now, though, I have another date with my good friend Unisom. Maybe he’ll be more effective when there aren’t freight trains of wind whipping past my windows.

I wanna move

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Dave left tonight to fly to California. Well, to try to fly to California anyway. Turns out, we’ve been having some crazy weather here – tons of rain (moreso than usual), high winds, etc. He got to the airport with plenty of time to spare, but the parking garage was flooded out, so it took him a while to navigate that. Then, once he got inside, the airport was a madhouse because of all the weather delays, so he ended up missing his flight.

The reason he was trying to fly tonight is because he’s supposed to be interviewing all day tomorrow with the company that is his #1 job pick. He’s had numerous phone interviews with these people (seriously, I lost count somewhere around teleconference number eight), and it sounds like the job is basically his, but they have this whole thing about wanting to meet the people they hire in person. Go figure.

The thing is, this is the perfect job for him – it’s exactly what he wants to be doing, it’s local (in fact, it sounds like he’ll be mostly working from home, which is awesome for me and the baby), the pay is good, it’s basically ideal. He’s gotten himself pretty stressed out during the past week preparing for this interview because he really wants this job. Which is totally unlike Dave – I’m the one who worries, he’s the one who’s always calm and says that everything will work out just fine. So if this is making him anxious, it must be a really, really big deal.

So, since the flight tonight is apparently not going to happen, and it takes over an hour to drive the 25 miles from our house to the airport in rush hour traffic, he decided to just find a hotel room near the airport so he can get up early and catch the first flight out, and hopefully still make it to his interview with plenty of time to spare. The alternative is that he’ll have to say “sorry, unavoidably bad weather” to these people and reschedule for next week sometime, which certainly wouldn’t be the end of the world, but I know that he’d like to go ahead and get on with the interview process. (As would I – it’d be nice to not have to think about his job situation over the holidays.) So I’m really hoping and praying that there are no problems with early flights tomorrow.

Meanwhile, back to me: you know how we live in the boonies? And how our power goes out every time the wind blows? Well, just try to guess how well we’ve fared with this crazy weather. Right. I’ve been sitting in the dark for the past few hours.

Because really, it’s not like being alone in the boonies at night isn’t creepy enough on its own. And it’s not like I don’t already freak out over every little god-blessed noise when Dave isn’t here at night. For example, I’ve never almost jumped out of my skin because of the sound of the auto-scooping litter box. No, seriously, it’s totally ok to just go ahead and turn off all the lights in addition to all of the creepy isolation. I’ll be fine.

I’m actually typing this entry in Word while my laptop is on battery power so I can post it later. I’ve taken a Unisom (a whole one instead of my usual half) in the hopes of knocking myself unconscious for the night. And since I don’t have a baseball bat, and we don’t believe in having guns in the house, I’ve put a frying pan on Dave’s side of the bed, because it was the only blunt, heavy weapon-like item that I could think of. Well, there is the garden shovel, but the shovel is dirty so I don’t want it in bed with me. At least the frying pan is clean. And that sucker is pretty solid, I think it could do some damage if a serial killer were to sneak into the house and try to murder me in my sleep. (Because you know that type of thing happens all the time.)

The wind outside is making creepy whooshing noises like something out of a bad horror movie. One of the candles I had going in our room just flickered out. And I’m starting to seriously reconsider this whole anti-gun stance of mine.

Edited to add: I changed the time stamp on this post to show when I actually wrote it. Another update will be coming soon.