- My freezer is filling up again. I even made a trip to Trader Joe's today to replace some of the items that were so tragically lost. (I am terrible about "stocking up" on things. I plan my menu, make my shopping list, and that's what I buy. Period. As a result, my freezer usually has about 3 things in it. Except for last week. As luck would have it, for the first time in the history of the universe, my freezer was stocked. And not with just any old stuff--but with really good Trader Joe's stuff. Oh, how my heart breaks to think of it. Luck has a perverse sense of humor sometimes.)
- I am caught up on laundry--well, as caught up as is humanly possible with a self-feeding baby and an almost-potty-trained preschooler. (The laundry was absolutely the worst part of last week. Because my dad had been in town, I was already way behind on laundry when we lost power. And it just kept piling up and piling up. As luck, perverse luck, would have it, David managed to wet the bed 3 times last week, while wearing a diaper! Sure, I did a little washing by hand. Most of all, I am so grateful to the friends who allowed me to do emergency loads of laundry at their homes! But 2 or 3 loads now and then was but a small dent in the ever growing Mt. Everest sitting on my washer. I felt like I was suffocating under all that laundry. With every messy bib, smelly towel, and dirty T-shirt, the pressure on my chest grew greater and greater. Finally, Friday night I realized I had to conquer the mountain, be it by laundromat or camping out at a friend's house for 18 hours. So I divided the laundry so I could see what I was really dealing with. The result? 13 loads!! I was crushed, broken, completely demoralized. That's when I called Deanna, my best friend from high school who I used to call to cry about boys. I was bawling, and I'm sure she thought someone had died--no, I just had a lot of laundry to do. But after a nice discussion of the financial meltdown, Sarah Palin, and the Beatniks, I felt much better.)
- The bathrooms are clean. (Actually, an advantage to having no light was that I couldn't ever see how dirty the bathrooms were. It was great. Ignorance is bliss! I think we might institute a flashlight/candlelight-only rule in the bathrooms from now on--then I won't have to clean them! On the down side, David still insisted on going to the bathroom alone with the door closed (without a flashlight!), and since his aim isn't the greatest even in the noonday sun . . . well, you can imagine what "his" bathroom was like.)
- The lost shingles have been replaced, and our landlord took away the fallen tree branches. (Besides the fact that we don't have to try to sell a house next spring, there are other advantages to renting, like: the landlord took away the fallen tree branches.)
Oh, and to briefly recap what we are recovering from: A week ago Sunday, in what I think was a surprise for most people, the remnants of Ike and a storm from the Great Lakes collided, producing a huge windstorm with hurricane-like winds of 40-70 mph. In an area like this, with lots of big old trees and above-ground power lines, it was a disaster. Millions of people were without power, and, since many of Ohio's crews were sent to Texas, other out-of-state crews had to be brought in to restore our power, so the initial recovery was slow. Most people had their power back by Wednesday (that's still 3 days!); ours was restored on Saturday; there were still people in our neighborhood without power today. This has been a very interesting experience, to say the least.
