Saturday, December 16, 2006

Survived the Storm...

Well, that was a barrel of fun!

After watching chunks of trees sail by in the comfort of the bank Thursday night, Val picked me up and drove me home. We knew it was going to be bad out, so we went to bed early and braced ourselves for the morning after.

The next morning we were out of power. Everyone was- the grocery stores were run by generators with plastic sheets taped over produce to keep in the cold. Batteries were stripped off the shelves, and we managed to buy the very last box of candles.

We placed the tadpoles in an insulated cooler and put them in the warmest place we could find, and wrapped blankets around our D. ventrimaculatus tank.

Driving around Redmond and Bellevue really put things in perspective. It was as if a bustling technological hub was reduced to a ghost town overnight. Every stop light was out, every non-grocery store was shut down (cops were outside to prevent theft and mobbing), cars were left on the side of the road after they ran out of gas... It was incredible.

When we got back home we had our first candlelight dinner together (perhaps my first candlelight dinner ever). We cracked open some sparkling apple cider and laughed about our situation of late- finding out we have to move, the snow storm, losing power. We drifted off to sleep cuddled together as the temperatures dropped well into the 30s.

2:45am rolled around, Val woke me up. Turns out a neighbor had left their fan on. He jumped up and hit the light switch, and we were both blinded by it. Thankfully, we're one of the lucky ones in the complex. The two buildings on the bottom of the hill still have no electricity.

It's incredible to know that so much was damaged, yet they could repair a large majority of it within 30 hours. We're definately lucky.

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