Power Outage

One thing that we really like about the area is the CRAZY storms that come through.  They really are quite entertaining (as long as you are inside nice and safe).  We had a particularly strong storm that came through and not only took out our power for 40 hours, but also took out a lot of beautiful, mature trees as well.

We just expected the power to come back on within a few hours, but when we woke up the next morning and saw that it was still gone, Preston made a trip to go get a couple coolers full of ice.   We put all of our refrigerated stuff in there and tried to keep our freezer shut.  Then, we pulled out our 72 hour kit (yea baby) and listened to our little radio about all the outages and what we should expect and places to go to cool off since we were in the middle of a heat wave too.  As the day went by, we thought for sure the power would come back on, but to no avail.  We went to a friend's home who had a/c and tried to hang out there as long as we could!  Then we all slept on the bottom floor where it was coolest and tried not to sweat all night.  I was putting cool cloths to Carl's head every once in awhile, poor kid.  

Well, by the next morning, when the power still hadn't come back on, we were starting to panic.  Our food in the freezer was close to the max time that we could safely keep it there without power and there wasn't any ice for the next 100 miles.  So... we encroached on our dear friends again and took all of our food to their house to put in their fridge and freezer (Thanks Jamie and Colby!!).

It was such a relief to go to church and be in a cool building.  You could tell those who didn't have power: hadn't shaven, wet hair, no tie...  We were included on that one!  We were just so happy to have running water!  

Well, when we got home, we heard a little hum and realized that our fans were running.  Our electricity had turned on about five minutes before we got home from church.  We may or may not have done a little dance and song when we got home!  It was such a miserable couple of days.  

Although, on the bright side, it has brought a lot of work to Preston's company and he has been very busy during a time that they don't usually have as much work.

This is a tree that Preston saw while he was working on clean up.  Let's just say that the storm brought a lot of beautiful, mature trees down. 

Glad I'm not this person.

 This is a home right across the street from the temple.  If you look close enough, you can see that the tree had completely uprooted, fell right down the middle of the house and it actually even hit the neighboring house as well.  Preston's company was called out to this one as well!  

All in all, I'm glad we are safe.  We still really like the storms here, though we like to keep our power.  This whole event got me to thinking of all the things that I am not prepared for if an emergency were to happen.  We were out of power for 40 hours and yet we were so unprepared for that.  We were lucky to have friends that had power nearby.  I can't imagine what we would have done had we not had running water. So since this has happened, I am taking a much closer look at our emergency preparedness and trying to learn more about what I can do to be prepared if something like this were to happen again.  Though, for the record, I love my a/c!