hell hath no furry like a tropical storm scorned. my prayers go out to the people in vermont and new york that were the hit the hardest by ms. irene. i'm not quite sure what your lover did to you to make you so angry, but i know you originated in the warm waters off of africa and i wish you would of dissipated in the huge barreness of the atlantic ocean before coming ashore.
anyway, after a couple of days of interrupted life we are getting back to normal today. we had to evacuate on saturday because we live in the coastal flooding zone in newport. my sweet brother who is also a rockstar survival gear man opened up his place in boston for us to schlep tons of luggage (who knew how long we might have to stay and for how long we would be without power for) and 4 bodies (2 that especially don't sit still for long and require moving of glass objects to higher locations for fear they would break them over each other's heads). we had fun all together on saturday night and my brother has cable tv. yes, the big kahuna. we did away with it this summer, so the girls got their fill of mind numbing tv shows. oh, and if you are ever left without power or in an emergency situation call my brother, matt lubs, he's prepared for anything. bottles of water, batteries, candles, granola bars, radios powered by batteries, board games, head lamps for everyone in the family, and first aid kits in almost every room because you never know when you'll cut your arm off and need a tourniquet.
after weathering the storm on sunday we called our neighbor who decided to stay in newport and she said all was okay. just some heavy winds with some downed branches but no major flooding. so after we said a prayer of thanks we decided on returning to no electricity on sunday night so we could try and salvage all the food we had in our refrigerator and freezer. after sorting through all of our freezer food i realized i must stop purchasing frozen vegetables. i swear there were 20 bags of every green vegetable known to man in our freezer which makes times like this where i want to shake my head and say what was i thinking. so after putting all our perishables in coolers with ice bags we decided to embrace the moment of tranquility instead of being bitter about being without electricity. so lots of twizzler eating by candle light and story telling and playing with wax once the candles burned. on monday we woke up and we were sort of, dare i say, liking this no electricty thing. quality family time, a long walk around newport, and a trip to the playground. before we knew it we got the electricity back on monday around noon. secretly i was a little disappointed. i know, the people still without power are cursing me right now, but my inner girl scout was starting to make an appearance and it was sort of fun.
wanted to thank the national grid workers that traveled from texas, idaho, and michigan to help us rhode islanders get our electricity back. you worked fast, almost faster than i would have liked in our no electricity world.