Beatiful Menace
Dec 11, 06:34 PM by Jonathan Camenisch
Since our friends and family have been reading about our fine state on the news, I thought I’d give you an update from the ground in Oklahoma City.
When I woke up yesterday morning (Monday), I looked out the windows to survey the damage. We already had ice on the ground the day before, and the forecast had called for drizzle all night.
When I saw water flowing down our street on top of the ice, I figured driving to work was out of the question. Later I saw cars driving down the road with little trouble, but I’ll get to that.
I settled down with my laptop to get some work done, and eventually thought to crank our thermostat up to 70 degrees to warm things up in case we lost power.
At about 9, we finally did lose power.
We were just fine, alive, in a warm dry house. No problem. It was an odd dilemma, though. What does one do with oneself when stuck home from work, with no way to “telecommute” and no way to even cook a meal?
It seems silly, but we must have spent an hour just debating about what to do with our day! The main thing I wanted was a warm cup of coffee, but we couldn’t even brew that.
After I at least got dressed (yes, I had been working in my pajamas), we got a visit from our neighbor. He checked in on us and offered the use of his generator if we needed to power anything for a while. He was on his way to walk around the neighborhood to survey the damage, so I went with him.
And ah, the sites! Ice is such a beautiful, sparkly thing. Of course, all the broken branches lying about aren’t so nice, but I guess we have to weed out the wimpy branches somehow. Every five or ten minutes, we would hear the cracking sound of a new branch falling down somewhere.
It turned out the power was out from our street south about a quarter mile. The houses across the street have power. The roads also looked a lot better than I had guessed.
When I got back to the house, I managed to get my car door open and start it up. I was thinking there might be better places to spend the day than at home.
Becca went with me to the office, taking the laptop along. She hooked up and worked on the Internet while I worked on my job. The building that hosts my office also provided her lunch along with me, which helped a bunch!
We went out to eat for supper, using a gift card we had received a few days ago. Sleeping at home last night was no problem. It was 54 degrees in the house when we went to bed, and 51 when we rose. It was darker than we’re used to, but candles actually work rather well—and Rebecca has plenty of them.
You can view the rest of the photos I’ve collected as a slideshow or just in the album.
