Oh Winter, You Are Still Here

Saturday was yet another gloomy rainy day, the weather channel predicted rain all day and night. I certainly didn't mind since rain means it's not going to snow and we are moving out of winter and into spring. What a silly girl I must be to really think that. I've been living in New England my whole entire life and I know that March is one of those months that it can hit 60 degrees or we can get three feet of snow and this can all happen in the same day. You just never know. And it has become quite clear to me that the weather channel has no idea what they are talking about.

So back to Saturday. What was a lazy, somewhat boring day, turned into a freakish and scary night.

In order to keep this story as short as possible (which it won't be), I will just give a brief play by play.

8:30 - I'm sitting on my couch with Rory when I look out the window to see the sky light up blue. As I am saying "wow, it's lightening out!" the power goes out and TJ yells for me to come to the kitchen. He sounds panicked!

8:35 - I'm in kitchen watching flames shooting over the tree line at the bottom of our street. Now in my mind this means my friends house has gone up in flames. I see my neighbor across the street jump in his car and fly down there to help. The fire seems to be causing these strange explosions that are lighting up the sky but because there are trees seperating my view from my friends house I can't really tell what is going on. But it looks bad!

8:40 - I am totally freaking out!!! In fact I am balling! I send TJ down to make sure my friend is out of his house and okay. As he puts on his jacket my neighbor across the street pulls back into his driveway and runs in his house. As TJ runs out the door, he notices the electrical box on my neighbors house is shooting out sparks. Holy crap the whole neighborhood is going to burn down! So TJ instead runs to the neighbor across the street to tell him his house is about to go up in flames too.

8:45 - I am so panicked at this point that I have Rory in her car seat just in case I need to get out of this place and I'm collecting my kitties cause they are coming too. TJ and the neighbor come back over and his house has stopped sparking. Our power starts to flicker on and off again, over and over again.

9:00 - The power goes out and doesn't come back on. I finally find out that my friends house is not on fire, but a power line went down and was whipping around hitting things and causing the explosions and fire. The neighbors house was apparently sparking because of a power surge cause by the downed wires. And my friend was out of his house and safe just in case the wire did start it on fire.

Okay, so now it doesn't sound so bad but while it was happening I was totally having a meltdown. This could be because I have watched my other neighbors house burn down twice in the last 15 years and I probably need therapy because it has me scared to death of fire. Could be because I have a baby that I need to keep safe. Or could be that I am at the wrong end of a dead end road and would be stuck here if anything went wrong. I think I'll go with all three.

So you would think that I would have calmed down once I knew everyone was okay and we were safe but no, I couldn't. I couldn't because that rain the weather channel predicted was not rain anymore....it was ice! The wind was so bad it knocked out the powerline, the roads were super icy and I couldn't go anywhere. Why would you want to anywhere you ask, oh well I'll tell you. Because we didn't have any power, therefore we didn't have any heat and oh, did I mention that I have a baby, and oh, did I mention that it was 26 degrees outside? Needless to say, I was a wreck! I had to decide whether to stay and take a chance of us freezing or get in a car and take a chance on the dangerous roads to get somewhere warm.

I chose to stick it out. I put Rory in about eight thousand layers, stuck her in her swing and covered her in twenty thousand blankets. Pulled the guest room mattress into the living room since it was the warmest room in the hosue. And sat up for many hours worrying and waiting for the power to come back on. Once I finally did fall asleep I proceeded to wake up every 10 minutes
(no lie, I set an alarm) for the entire night to check on Rory and make sure she wasn't an ice cube.

At 8:15 a.m. the power finally came back on. Rory had no idea anything even happened and slept better than she normally does. I, however, was so tired that I felt drunk. And of course, once I didn't have to worry anymore and could finally get some sleep, Rory decided it was time to get up.

It turns out that all the stressing I did over making the right decision of whether to stay or go was entirely pointless since the bottom of my street flooded and we couldn't have left if we wanted to.

Insane!

Damn the weather channel and damn the month of March!

I'm moving south!