The Great Blackout of '08

(Cellphone picture of Baby Kelly by candlelight)

I've been meaning for some time now to post about the crazy time we had back in September. It seems so long ago, it happened before all of this depressing economy stuff (Now's the time to get "Financial Peace" today! http://www.daveramsey.com/) and election hoopla and I guess that family life in general makes time do funny things! Anyway, thanks to Hurricane Ike we were part of the worst power outage in 30 years! Driving home from church on Sunday I had to fight wind gusts of up to 75 miles an hour! It was weird because the sky was clear and the sun was bright, but the winds were just brutal. I pulled into our little one car garage and started to unload little Kelly. By the time I went to close the garage door, the power had gone out. I went inside and Micah, who had just returned from work and had turned on the Wii to play some video games while waiting for us to get home, said, "The power is out." We didn't think much of it and went on with our day, eating cold cuts for lunch and reading and playing with the baby. I was still thinking that I had a church board meeting to go to that evening and decided to take a nap. When I woke up I noticed that the little tree just outside our patio door was bent almost hortizontal to the ground and there were big waves on the surface of our pond. The power was still out and the meeting was cancelled since there was no power at the church. One of the highways was closed due to large trees on the road and 500,000 customers were without power in the Cincinnati area. We learned all of this thanks to Micah's smart phone that had internet access and we started to worry that the power wasn't going to come back on before dark.

Well, all together we were without power for 56 hours. The wind warped our garage door enough that I couldn't get it open--we thought that the locking mechanism was jammed and I was without transportation or access to a cell phone charger, making for a pretty miserable Monday. Kelly was the least phased by the outage (the only changes for her were that she had to switch to disposable diapers and we had to find her a battery powered night light) but she chose this stressful time to do some heavy-duty teething! Micah got home really late to a pretty desperate Momma and baby. We had to practically empty our fridge and go searching the area stores that had power for food, medicine for a teething baby and batteries. Our power finally came back on while we were away having a blackout bonfire and Zach and Katie's. It was exciting to drive home and see lights on in neighborhood closer and closer to home until we finally spotted our window from the road! We did a electric slide of joy! We quickly did laundry so that Micah could attend a work conference in Atlanta and about two hours after I dropped him off at the airport we lost power again! Luckily it came on again at 3 AM! We will always remember this crazy time! Hopefully we will be better prepared for future natural disasters. (Momma is stocking up on camping and emergency supplies!)