Apocalypse Now - Seattle Style

No sooner do I make a post-a-day promise, when weather mayhem dashes it all. The weather up here in the Northwest has been maginificent, property destroying, and flabbergasting. My God, I found myself wondering if we moved to a trailer park in Florida?

In the last month or so, we had:

Torrential rains that caused flooding-luckily we were on the plateau so we were spared, while other's homes floated down rivers. It was the wettest month of November ever--and that's saying something because Seattle is known for it's rain!

The next week came a powerful windstorm that knocked down trees and power. We were only gifted with a 23 hours power outage. One school day was lost and subtracted from school vacation on the end.

The next week came an amazing snow/ice storm which caused mayhem and havoc on Seattle area drivers. I discussed this in detail on previous posts so we won't go into the agony of three snow days with bored kids.

Then, we had a week of normalcy just to fake us out.

Now we come to this last week:

We had a magnificent wind storm with a prelude of torrential rains before hand. Winds were clocked at 135 miles per hour. I heard that over 1 million people were without power the first night. All of our trees in the backyard now lean to the side. More importantly, huge numbers of trees took out power lines. Our main boulevard was litered with beautiful pines uprooted or gorgeous old growth copses of trees now broken in half with only massive logs thrusting into the sky without foliage. Luckily, no one from our family or group of friends was hurt.

We were boxed into our neighborhood for a day or so and went without power for 66 hours. We cooked on a camp stove (no gas cooktop yet) and watched alot of our refrigerator's contents rot. Our house dipped to 55 degrees for 2 of those days. We had no cell coverage, no wifi connection, and no landline phone to plug in. I almost strangled my kids and husband after a while. Stir craziness and depression set in.

A large portion of our neighborhood came prepared with emergency generators. They apparently know something about our new home that we are just discovering. The buzz of generators through the night just amped up the mania of our existance. The throat-closing haze of woodsmoke over the area as people sought warmth was amazing. We traded a gallon of gasoline to a neighbor to fuel a movie for the neighborhood kids. In exchange, he hosted said video with spluttering generator for two hours while CG and I got a break from the cacaphony of whining.

Luckily, on the third day, we ventured out and found a warm lunch in a place with power. We arrived back to our neighborhood, only for it to be blocked by electricity workers. Police were very unhelpful, but we were able to find our way back through a unlocked fire trail. Then we went to the movies and came back to out street glowing once again with holiday lights.

On the down side, of course, I spent hours preparing for the class parties that were cancelled, prepping for a pre-school party at our home which was cancelled, and prepping for houseguests--mainly my parents for Christmas--who cancelled. I missed a party helping my son on his report that he never gave. We added another school day because the last day of school before break was lost. If this pattern keeps up, we won't start summer break until July!

On the good side, we spent each night by our gas lit firelight, with 50 candles glowing and glittering off sparkling Christmas bulbs, full of cheery Christmas spirit, singing Christmas carols and playing board games. I even got CG to sing on occasion when my slaughtering of lyrics became too much for him. In the end, I am sure we have made beautiful memories for our children.

So my thoughts move warily to next week. What's next-- locusts?

At least, I can be happy now, in my now overly-warm feeling house, with CG making me fabulous coffee while I plunk away with my wifi connection once again back to normal.

Note: All photos compliments of the Seattle Times. I was going through too much wicked electronics withdrawals to take many pics.

'lisciously scribed by Scout's Honor @ 10:11 AM