lucky ones

A huge storm came through here on Friday night.  Hurricane force winds, they say.  Our corner of the city seems to be the hardest hit.  Not far from our house eight HUGE electric poles and power lines came down onto a pretty major road.  Cars were trapped for over five hours without water--thankfully the storm had brought cooler temps so they weren't stranded in near 100 degree heat as it would have been just minutes before.  My husband got home from work just a few minutes before all of this started.  I would hate to think of him having to drive in it.

Much of the city lost power.  Stores, businesses, street lights, and many, many homes.  Many are still without power, over 48 hours later.  In this terrible heat. 

Another storm came through tonight with winds not quite as bad, but still very high speed.  Somehow, through all of this, we still have power.  It went off for a few minutes three different times during the storm, but each time it came back on.  That never happens.  If it's off, it's usually off for awhile. 

The more people we talk to, the more we hear from people who don't have power.  And it only increases our thankfulness that we have been spared the difficulty and discomfort that most of the city is experiencing.  People have lost trees or have property damage.  Our picnic table blew over and we had some tree limbs in our yard, we lost a shingle from the roof, and one of my tomato plants broke in half, but otherwise we were unscathed.

Here are the most difficult parts of the experience for us (and it's really nothing, compared with what other people are dealing with):  Last night we went out to dinner for our anniversary.  We had to go to the other side of town, since many places over here were closed, due to power outages, and if they weren't closed, they were completely packed.  So we drove to the other side of town where we saw very little power outage, and had a wonderful dinner.  The other difficulty came today when we tried to get gas.  Many places are still closed.  The first station we went to only had premium gas.  The second station could only accept cash, which we didn't have, since we planned to use our debit card.  The third and fourth stations were closed, and the last one was out of the 87 octane gas, so we had to get the 89 octane midgrade gas (thankfully we have so many stations around us to choose from!).  I'm thankful that these are the only issues we've encountered.  We went to the grocery store and they had power and all of the items we needed (bread, peanut butter, and milk--if they had been out of peanut butter I think the world would've come to an end at our house)! 

So we're the lucky ones in all of this.  Lucky and very, very grateful.