They warned us (a lot of good that did), and sure enough when I woke up the next morning my power was out. Temperatures hovered around 0 degrees so I stayed in bed and read…for two days…by flashlight…one book after another. Only got up to grab a sandwich to burrow under my covers with. By the end of the second day everything in my freezer was thawed. It clearly didn’t get freezing inside the house right away. It sure felt like it though. I thought a full freezer would be insulated enough to last a while.

By the third day I was getting desperate. My flashlight was dying (what me have spare batteries?), I was getting hypothermia,  I couldn’t get warm even under my covers, and the windchill had dipped to -25. I tried my neighbor, no answer. I went to my car but couldn’t get my garage door open (automatic doncha know), so I started the car and hoped the fumes would go out the back door of the garage. Before the car ever got warm I could see that wasn’t happening. Went back into my cold, cold house and wandered around crying like a baby for a while. Then standing looking out my front door window I saw a couple guys getting into a truck an ran out there like a mad woman. They helped me get the garage open and I got in my car and headed south. I seriously considered going real far south but drove just far enough that the trees weren’t covered in ice and rented a motel room. Once there, between my laptop and the television I got the scoop. Something like 73,000 without power and I find out the shelter was 2 blocks from my house! They should have been putting notices in mailboxes or going up and down streets with bullhorns or something to let us know.

Next day, I had decided to go to Michigan for Christmas after all. But I needed tires so I stop at Walmart and get told that they don’t even make 12 inch tires anymore and I’d need to go somewhere that might be able to special order 13 inch rims that would fit my car. Great, bad enough driving around this city on glare ice, I’m not heading to Michigan on bald tires. I headed home (only 53,000 still without power), still no power. I grabbed my cellphone because the last motel had screwed up phones and wouldn’t let me make a long distance call. I had this brilliant plan that I’d buy a car charger for the phone and sit in a motel parking lot and look up motels on my laptop and start calling them to find a cheap one that would allow my cats. Well, I got lost looking for a motel…yeah, yeah, I’ve lived here two years and still barely know my way around. So once I actually found my way into the city again, I stopped at the first one I came to and checked in. Called my daughter and she decided to come pick me up and take me up to Michigan. The motel was nice enough to charge me a half day rate for the two hours I spent there :p

We headed back to my house to pick up the presents and cats and low and behold, the power was back on! Only my dear beloved furnace wasn’t. So I left the cats with a space heater turned on and away we went. Had a nice warm few days in front of a roaring fire, spent lots of family time and headed back the day after Christmas with both my girls. It was terrible, black ice on the highway, vehicles off the road every few feet. Saw a nasty accident with an rv, but they weren’t hurt. We get to the Indiana border and it’s all dry road but then we hit a huge traffic jam and not one radio station would tell us what was going on. After I got home and got a furnace guy out (again) he said they had this hail/sleet/snow stuff that was so bad that they closed 69. I want to know how you close a highway. Did they just park a couple cop cars up at the head of the line? So a normal 2 hour trip took 4 and everything was still iced up everywhere.  The space heater had quit so I’m assuming the power had gone out again at some point. At least the poor cats survived.

I understand that the power company was overwhelmed but where the hell were the street people? I still have the downed branches here at the curb and not once did they come salt any of the smaller roads in the city, it was glare ice for days here until it melted on it’s own. So I was foiled on my vow to never again go through that ordeal of going back and forth over the holidays in crappy weather. But hey, at least it wasn’t me driving!

I threw away every single thing in my freezer which was a mess with venison blood all over it and most of what was in my fridge too. The Christmas dinner, the veggies from my garden that I froze all summer long. That totally sucked. But I’m home, it’s warm, the cats are glad to have me back, we are all glad to have heat. Heh, Happy New Year!

P.S. After I left my house and actually was driving around the city I was so upset that I hadn’t brought my camera. At the time just getting warm was more important but it was incredible really, ice everywhere with the sun shining on it, it looked like something out of Dr. Zhivago. Much easier to appreciate when you are warm again.