The Storm for Us

Somehow, we got through the storm unscathed. We never lost power, and all of the beautiful trees in our yard stayed standing. We are lucky. Next door, and down the rest of the block, power is still out. (Two neighbors have strung extension cords to our outdoor outlets.) A gigantic tree a little ways down our street was uprooted and is still blocking the road; it took down an entire power-line pole, and the line was still live yesterday. Just up the street from us, as well as over one block, enormous trees were uprooted and fell over onto houses. A neighbor told us that a couple of blocks away, a tree split a house's second and third stories in half. So, we are lucky. Friends came over yesterday to charge phones and warm up (she's eight months pregnant; they have two other kids; still no power). We, on the other hand, went to Home Depot to buy paint--Andrew's office is closed for the rest of the week so we decided to undertake a home-improvement project, painting the "rec room" in the basement. Like I said--lucky.

We don't have TV or internet service, and we haven't gotten a newspaper all week, so we feel oddly cut off from the storm and everything else, our world barely larger than our neighborhood. This is very frustrating since the election is Tuesday, but also somewhat liberating; I'm at a cafe right now while Lucia's in preschool, catching up on news online, and reading the latest from Nate Silver made my blood pressure spike. (For just a moment I felt like I was back in 2008, hours slipping away as I refreshed and refreshed and refreshed various news sites, starving for any scrap of new information. In 2008, I did not have kids.)

Anyway. We have nothing to complain about. We are happy and warm and well-fed. Our house was a true fortress during the storm, too--we barely heard the wind, and there weren't even any rattling windows. It's a house that's built to last.