Thanks, everyone, for the warm and kind welcome back. The warmth was particularly appreciated after 8 days in a very cold house.
My power was just off again for another hour and a half, but this time our power company had turned it off because they were removing a large tree that fell on power lines near here last night and they had to cut the power to remove the tree. I breathed a huge sigh of relief when the lights came on again.
It's hard to stock up on an adequate supply of non-perishable food, that's palatable, for a very extended period. Beside the usual things like peanut butter, canned tuna, etc., I bought a huge supply of high protein bars, and meal replacement bars, and those did come in fairly handy and tasted reasonably good. But one does long for a hot meal, or drink, when sitting in the cold for days, and that was hard to come by until restaurants and some take-out places began opening. Most of the places that sell or serve hot food around here were not open right after Sandy breezed by, and those few that were, like an isolated Dunkin Donuts, had long lines outside of them of people just waiting to buy hot coffee in the morning. We weren't able to go out to get a decent hot meal until Sunday, and that was a long stretch.
Now the Red Cross is sending out mobile units with hot meals to help those still stuck in cold houses, but there really isn't good communication, so I don't know how people can find them. They've finally opened many more warming stations than they had open last week, so that's good, and the temperatures should warm up considerably over the weekend which should help those still without power and heat, at least a little. I can't imagine how those with young children are managing in cold homes without a lot to feed those children. Not everyone can afford to eat out over so many days, the schools were closed last week, and again today because of last night's storm, so there wasn't even that option to get the children meals. As happy as I am to have my power and heat back, I am really very bothered thinking about those who still don't have it--and, even worse, those who don't even have homes now.
We've weathered lots of bad storms, of all sorts, in the past, but nothing quite like this with such widespread, very extended, power outages all over. Last March our power was out for 5 days, but it was a limited outage, we had one working outlet in a bedroom and one in the kitchen, and we had power for the furnace, so it was much more tolerable and computer access was possible, and other past outages have never generally been beyond a day or two because we have a very efficient local power company that only has to serve a limited area, so they can generally get things up and running pretty quickly. But this storm really was something else...
I don't know how the early settlers did it. I'm definitely not cut from pioneering stock.
Uh oh, my lights just flickered again...
