Disaster Number Three

I have a few minutes at a friend’s house to type a quick blog entry and thaw my toes and my children.

A major windstorm hit the Seattle area Thursday night, knocking down trees and leaving millions of residents without power, so says my hand-crank radio and the guy who lives inside it. My local web host has been down since power went out on Thursday and it doesn’t look like we’ll have power any time soon so you may not even be able to read this. I’m trying to switch to an out-of-town host with a reliable power supply.

Huge 100 foot tall trees flew through the air with 50+ mile winds. Several homes on our blocks had trees fall through their roofs, our mailboxes were obliterated, street light sliced off at the top, and driveway blocked by a massive tree. The temperature is in the 20s and we’re using a small kerosene heater to keep warm.

The first night we had a party, using up some of the food in our fridge and burning candles for light. At this point we’ve thrown out most of our refrigerated food and put the rest outside to stay cool. We somehow found a generator tonight but all the gas stations with power are out of gas so we can’t get fuel to run the generator.

We spent Saturday at a mall an hour away, eating at Claim Jumper, “testing” the massagers at Brookstone and trying to keep warm. I don’t think we bought anything that wasn’t edible. We’re cold and dark but we have clean clothes thanks to the friends who invited us over for dinner and laundry tonight.

We’re lucky not to have any trees through our roof. We have a gas water heater and stove so we can cook and shower. We charged our car dvd players and cell phones so we can watch a couple of movies tomorrow. We have enough kerosene to heat a room in the house for a few more days. We have granola bars and kind neighbors.

The power is estimated to come on sometime between Wednesday and Christmas Eve. Considering the number of severed power lines laying on the ground around our neighborhood and the fact that I have yet to see a single power crew here, I think Wednesday’s optimistic.