When the Homily is about Immunology

Day Four

Well my utter lack of blogging - as opposed to just a reduced weekend blogging - is indicative of the fact that we remain in the dark, and while we have certainly fallen into some semblance of a routine it is beginning to grow tiresome. I expect that by the time this is all over and the power does return, I will have forgotten that flipping switches around the house usually affords one the ability to see. Truly it will be interesting to see what habits we will have developed...maybe the TV will stay off more? Good, I say publicly.

Being powerless lumps us in with some 200,000 other people in the same situation. As for us, we can drive past the obvious cause which remains as it was on the first day that the tree hit the lines. On Friday, the Water Company showed up with a generator and hooked it up to our community well. My wife spoke with the man who promised that someone would be by every 6 hours to fill it with gas.

The arrival of water was a great relief to us, however, the promises of the water man was to be futile. Not only does the generator never manage to run for 6 hours, but the gas refill never happens on anything remotely close to a regular schedule. My attempts at volunteering to tend the machine were rebuffed against company policy...tosh, my policy is that my family be able to more reliably have water. The windstorm was followed by a stretch of wonderfully clear and sunny days which made the darkness more bearable - even though the clear skies always spell C-O-L-D. But the cold is a mixed blessing itself because it has allowed us to have a place to store perishable food and the freezer which sits outside does not need power when the temperature is 27F. Sue and I managed to get about a half dozen more fence posts set on Saturday using ground and rain water to mix the cement - since the water pump generator had reliably quit running.

But I do not wish to paint too bleak of a picture, some people don't even have a heat source and most of them have evacuated to friend's or family's homes where there is power and/or heat. We are blessed to have a good stockpile of wood and a very hot wood stove...the kids have been blessed to have virtually NO media and have somehow survived, and Sue and I have found ourselves content to just relax near the fire after the kids are in bed.

I checked the chickens as I left this morning and despite the cold and dark, they seem to be doing just fine. With any luck (weather related) we will have them doing their chickeny things outside by Christmas.

No doubt, we have been challenged since our move...but we are not discouraged. But, this will be a winter that we will talk about for a long time to come...and it isn't even over yet. For us, it will be particularly memorable one.