Oh Sandy Baaaaby

If you did not just read the title of this blog as though you were John Travolta singing to Olivia Newton-John please stop reading and start over.  Thank you.

So we had a hurricane.  And as I hinted at in my last blog post, I went above and beyond preparing for it in hopes that it would end up being less of an ordeal.  Well, it didn't end up being a very severe storm, but that didn't make it any easier.

We lost our power (as expected) around 11:00 on Monday night.  That was actually much later than I anticipated us losing power.  We are usually out as soon as a stiff breeze picks up.  Unfortunately, my little community in Waterboro tends to be last on the CMP priority list.

So imagine my surprise when I got word that the neighbors down the street had their power back early Tuesday evening!  I thought sure that we would be next.   So I went to bed Tuesday night fairly confident that our power would be back before I had to get up Wednesday morning and get ready for work.

Nope.

Despite the fact that the house on the corner of my road FIVE houses down had power Tuesday evening, we waited until shortly before seven on WEDNESDAY before we got ours back.  (Um, thanks to Bangor Hydro, by the way, for actually making that happen.)

We've lost our power for much longer, and at much colder times of the year, but I can't tell you how annoying it was to see lights at the end of the road but still have to get up in the morning and take a damn sponge bath.

So yeah, that sucked.  But it wasn't the suckiest part.

Monday night, during the storm, I was sitting on the couch doing homework.  And by homework I mean I had an open text book on my lap and I was asleep.  At about 10:00 an extremely loud crack and thud occurred DIRECTLY outside the widow behind the couch where I was sitting.

I know that as a mom I've always been curious about how I would react to an emergency involving my son.  Would I instinctively put him first like I'm supposed to, or would that fight or flight instinct kick in and I would act instinctively to save myself?  Well, I can safely say, I would be all over my son.  I jumped off the couch and ran towards his room so fast I actually fell before I got to the stairs.  My husband picked me up and told me to slow down, that Ben was fine.  I think I garbled something out at him about not being awake and not caring and I hauled it up the stairs.

He was stretched out on his bed and snoring.

I thought I was going to have a heart attack.  At the time, we thought the tree had just come down right next to the house, narrowly missing our pellet stove vent.  Nope.  In the morning we discovered that it had fallen on the roof, broken apart, slid down the wall, cracked up our siding and then landed just a few feet away from our pellet stove vent.  Awesome.

 

 

 

 

The damage is relatively minor and should be inexpensive to repair.  We were pretty lucky and will probably be doing some dead tree removal later this fall or in the spring. 

So that sucked.  Now do you want to hear the suckiest part?

Waking up Wednesday morning without power knowing that the neighbors all had power was pretty damn frustrating.  Having the generator not start was REALLY frustrating.  Discovering that your cars had been broken into, well, that was just miserable.

We live in a pretty quiet country neighborhood.  We don't keep much in our cars, and we don't lock them at night.  We've never had a problem.  But, apparently someone decided they needed to take advantage of us unfortunate folks without electricity and steal from us.  Fortunately we really don't keep anything in our cars, so nothing was taken from mine.  Don had his GPS in his car that was taken, it was rather old and not really worth anything, but it is something he uses often.  He felt pretty violated.  The thieves were also poking around our shed, so we were actually very fortunate that they didn't try to run away with our generator, snow blower or lawn mower.

We did call the police and I guess it had happened to several cars on our road during the course of the night.  Needless to say, our house has become Fort Knox.  Don has instituted a locked door policy at all times, the car doors are locked, the shed is locked, and he's on a mission this weekend for security lights and new door knobs.  We're also going to look at getting the generator wired into the fuse box so we can keep outside lights on when the power is out.  (It will also give us hot water when the power is out...so I'm totally ok with that!)

So, while Hurricane Sandy may not have been the strongest storm up here in Maine, and we may not have been without power for that long a period of time, it was still one of our worst storm experiences.

And it also left me with that damn song Sandy from Grease stuck in my head.  It's not even one of the cool songs.  Uggggh.