Excuses, or reasons…

February 13-17: those were the days we had no electricity. We had one of those famous Oregon ice storms and this time it was bad. Like the last time it was bad. And the time before that. The first time I remember a bad ice storm was in 1979 and this one seemed much worse. Maybe because I am a responsible adult now and I don’t remember missing much back then.

So we were sitting around on February 12. It was a snow day. In fact, I made snow ice cream for my students in Culinary Skills during our class check in. Snow ice cream is where you mix up cream, vanilla and sugar in a bowl and then add scoops of snow to make it into ice cream consistency. I think my students thought it was cool (literally). And it was tasty! Later while we were sitting down to eat, the power went out. We scrambled around looking for candles and flashlights. By the time we found the necessities, the power came back on again. No biggie. We finished our dinner and the power kept flashing on and off until we decided to just go to bed. I had a hard time sleeping. The power kept going off and my clock radio would start flashing. At one point, after a few hours of no sleep, I realized our pump in the pond had turned off. For some reason, that was bothering me. I finally got up and checked things out. The wind was blowing and there was freezing rain. It had started a few hours earlier and was building up on everything. I looked outside and there was a sheen! About 4:30 or so, I woke up Mike and told him that the pump was off. About that time I started noticing flashes reflecting onto the wall of our bedroom. Around 5:00, the power went off and came back on again and then it went off for good. Little did we know, it would be off until Wednesday night.

The first night without power, we managed to fix ourselves tomato soup and grilled cheese. Fortunately we have a gas stove and we could light the burners and cook. It turned out too, that we could use the burners to warm the kitchen/family room area, and one time we actually got it up to 64 degrees. Our bedroom on the other hand was freezing. We piled blankets onto the bed and tried to stay warm. We also had a small pile of firewood and we managed to use most of it up by the time we got power again.

On Monday morning, the temperature finally got above freezing. And then the ice chunks started falling out of the trees. It was crazy. Scary crazy. We couldn’t go outside for fear of getting pelted by ice chunks or tree branches.

I was attempting to teach from home without power and using my cell phone as a hotspot and my laptop, which was 85% charged. It died about 6 minutes into my last class so I started up my personal laptop, which had about a 35% charge and finished the class. After the ice chunks stopped, we decided it was time to make a plan, so we headed over to Mike’s mom’s house (she had power). We showered and ate dinner and then headed over to my daughter’s and picked her up and brought her to our house. She had lost power too.

I decided to go to work on Wednesday, if only for heat. It was a relief to not be shivering! You become thankful for the little things! Heat, etc. At any rate, our power came back on Wednesday afternoon for about an hour (according to our neighbors) and then went off again. Then it came on for good around 5:00. We almost had a party in the streets!

So we are back to normal. Some people are still cleaning up trees and debris, but thankfully, we are safe and sound. Some major trees in Gladstone fell and caused damage, but to my knowledge, no one was hurt or died in the storm.

We did some wedding planning this weekend. We now have a party hostess, our good friend Brenda. She has agreed to coordinate food and beverages at the shindig, which is going to be great! That is a big deal to us! I also talked to another friend (Sandra) about flowers for the wedding. She will also be great! She is a teacher (and saint, in my opinion, since she teaches middle school).

So, I made it to JoAnn’s today to purchase a couple items for my dress, but unfortunately, did not make any progress on my dress. I was hoping to make a lot of progress, but it did not happen. We are still moving forward and counting down.

Ice is so beautiful, yet can be so devastating. I’m sure glad we don’t have to worry about this stuff in August! Stay safe and stay well!