Exactly HOW did I manage THIS?

I don’t think I could have PAID someone to put this in better.  At least I know the hiss isn’t my brains leaking out.  Sheesh!

Murses..Just for Kane

It takes a true man with lots of testosterone to carry a murse!

High Wind Advisory, My Behind

After a gorgeous Easter day Sunday, the clouds started to roll in around dinner time.  It rained and poured from about midnight until half past midnight as I recall it.  Then, the WIND started to blow.  Blow sounds like such a puny word, because it blew from about 1:30 am until 3 am without really letting up.  Now, I’ve come to expect gusts and blasts of wind preceding, during, and a little bit after a line of showers comes through, but this was different.  It was like someone had turned on a giant fan and left it on high for an hour and a half.  I kept listening for a tornado siren or the dead calm that comes before something disastrous so that I would have an excuse to grab the kids and hide in the basement, but neither came.  Then I started hoping someone would wake up and want to come in our bed, but Gloria and Thomas just kept on sleeping.

So at 2:30ish Michael stirred and I sent him to go get my laptop so I could "check the weather" as though we would still have internet access after all the carrying on that was going on outside.  He graciously fetched the device and informed me that the trees were blowing all over the place like he’d never seen before.  He invited me to come look, but I was too chicken.  It sounded that bad.

Surprisingly, we still had an internet connection, so I checked the weather to see that the rain was all definitely past us and that there was a "high wind advisory."  Really?  Because I needed "advice" about it?  It was blowing like the dickens out there and all they could say was "high wind ADVISORY?"  Not a warning-just an advisory?  Tell me something I DON’T know.  So, I clicked on the link to the "high wind advisory."   Nothing. 

"Michael, our internet looks like it just went out."

"Really?  I’m surprised it worked at all."

"Um.  Yes.  Just now.  No.  Wait.  Our network is down, too.  That’s weird."

"Hey, Melissa."

"Yes?"

"The power’s out."

"Well then.  That explains why the wireless network is down as well.  Good thing my laptop has a battery for times like this."

Monday morning we all got dressed and went for a walk (Michael and Thomas had the day off already) to view the damage from the wind.  It was so impressive we had to come back and get the camera for documentation purposes.

There is a cull-de-sac right around the corner from us.  This is what we saw there:

Yes, that is a transformer on the ground, a downed tree, and that wooden thing sticking up is not a tree but the power pole where it snapped off.

We went a little further down the street and saw:

They were already replacing another power pole.  If you look right across the street from the truck, you can see the top of the pole, complete with transformer in the neighbor’s driveway.  The pole had snapped and the tension on the lines pulled the top half all the way across the street.

It’s not every day you see the top half of a power pole dangling across the street from where it should be!

They were "trapped" in their house  by the mess in their driveway.

A little farther down the street we saw the culprit behind 3 snapped power poles was a tree that blew over into the road, snapping the first one, and causing a domino effect for two others:

 
Above you can see the guilty tree in the back and another downed power pole in the front.  The tree fell so that it blocked the road completely, but it missed the mailbox by inches.

 
Here’s another look at the same tree.  If you look closely, you can see ANOTHER pole being replaced on the other side of the same tree.  It got the poles on either side of it, plus the one that flew across the street.

And across the street from the above:
No transformers this time, just a mess of lines.  (I must point out for Thomas that this is the house where one of the "cafeteria ladies" from school lives.)

Down towards the end/beginning of our street we saw:

And right across the street was:
The top of the pole, with the transformer!  Do you see a pattern here?

On another street that connects to ours a tree fell straight towards a freshly painted and newly re-roofed house:

Amazingly, the limbs didn’t break the windows or split the siding.  Instead, they just flexed.  They missed a car in the driveway by about a foot.  I am glad for them!

In all, there were 8 poles that had to be replaced.  There were 6 on our street and 2 more on a street that runs parallel (roughly) to ours.  We had power restored around 3pm Tuesday afternoon.  We do have phones back on, but no cable or internet service at this time.  There are still dead transformers and lines all over the neighborhood.  At least 3 people had their power meters ripped right off of their house.  There were also several trees that got uprooted on our street.  Thankfully, we had nothing more than some small sticks come down in our yard and we lost all the ice cream in our freezers.  I guess the trees in our yard that were "weak" already came down earlier this year and we probably didn’t really "need" the ice cream anyway!

The power was out, now it is just cable that is out

After the storms came through Sunday night / early Monday morning, we were without power.  It seems that more than one tree decided to lay down and stop fighting with the wind.

The power was out from around 3 AM Monday morning, until around 3 PM Tuesday afternoon.  The repair crews had a lot of work getting all the poles that broke replaced, as there were about 8 of them in our neighborhood that broke. 

Now if Charter will get our cable service back so that we can have internet access at home, that would be wonderful.  At that time, Melissa can post the pictures of the destruction…

The Evidence…

As evidence that Marge was correct when she said that “She grew up to be a beautiful lady with many talents,” when she was talking about Melissa, I wanted to share some of the reasons that I agree:

Beautiful:

And here is just a small selection of her talents:

She makes beautiful babies:

She feeds our babies:

And does countless other things for us that are her way of showing us her love.  She is very smart, very caring, and just fun to be around.

She is perfect, in my not so humble opinion…

Another “Little Helper”

I opened up my email this morning to find one entitled “My Little Helper” from my mother.  She had sent a sweet picture of her oldest daughter (that would be me) at about 20 months old.  Just a few months younger than little Gloria now.  Here is the message and picture:

Once upon a time I had a sweet little helper that was every bit as cute as your little helper.  She grew up to be a beautiful lady with many talents.  Here is what she looked like once upon a time.

Tee-hee.  I was so cute.  What happened?!

What to Plant?

It is time for me to do SOMETHING about our pitiful front flower bed. For the first two years we were here, I planted some cute little bubblegum pink azaleas. The first two summers we were here were also record breaking droughts, so now there are only a couple of azalea twigs left. (This is out of 10 total, with 5 being replanted after the first year.) There is yellow lantana in the front, but of course it isn’t up yet and dies down during the winter to make it look completey empty and lifeless.
As of now, I have narrowed it down to the idea of perhaps putting some small gardenia bushes there-because we don’t have enough carpenter bees living in our porch rails-or some small white azaleas yet again.
I’ve contemplated boxwoods (no flowers), nandinas (poisonous berries and more of a fall display anyway), and cactus (they’d survive a drought!).
I might have to look around some more. Sigh.

Seriously?

I’ve been working all morning on a dress for little Gloria.  She and Daniel have been playing in the living room and I check on them in between each step.  (Pin the fabric.  Check on kids.  Sew a seam.  Check on kids.  Get out the seam ripper and sit on the couch and watch them.)  My last seam must have taken longer than I thought.  I excitedly went in to try out my creation on Gloria and found this:

I could see one of them asleep, but both?

We did have a thunderstorm wake everyone up about 5 this morning.  We ended up with the whole family in the same bed for about an hour.  No one got any more sleep, but we did get to snuggle under the lovely new quilt Grandma made for us!  I guess the early morning tuckered them out.

Daniel is up now, eating lunch with me.  Hopefully, Gloria will awaken soon so I can feed her and try that silly dress on her already.  Then maybe.  Just maybe.  I’ll get some grocery shopping done.  We seem to run out of everything all at once around here.

System Outages

I thought it might be worth noting for anyone that actually reads this Blog, that once a month the systems that support this site are taken down for maintenance.  This usually occurs the 3rd Thursday of the month. 

Yesterday was the 3rd Thursday of the month, so this site was down for a little while. 

Now, if I can just get some down time of my own…

MyStickyKeys

I have noticed recently that some of my keys are sticking-specifically the space bar. It’s driving me batty as it creates run on words. Michael wanted to know what I was spilling all over my keyboard. Now, I know I take my laptop all over the place, and I even have been known to eat in front of it, but I am pretty careful not to actually spill anything IN the keys. Perhaps I might type with sticky fingers, but that just makes the top of the keys messy and has never interferred with their function.
Then I sat down to nurse Daniel and figured it out. I often nurse him in front of the keyboard during the day. He has developed this habit of waiting for the let down and then coming off to feel it spray on his face (or in his ear) before getting down to business and actually eating. I can watch his face as he concentrates on the feeling of it trickling down. He seems to find it interesting. Unfortunately, sometimes the spray hits the keyboard instead of him. This would explain the sticking keys. So if you notice some run on words, I promise, I did press the spacebar, butitstuck and I’mblamingitonDaniel!