Feeling Powerless

I was sitting near the large picture window in my living room Thursday afternoon when rain started pouring down in buckets. Big fat raindrops that smacked the ground with such force I almost mistook the rain for hail. I anxiously thought of my boys who were on their way home from a playdate at the clean house, a 30-40 minute drive in good weather. The drops thinned out and then stopped. The wet grass and bushes look refreshed, vibrant. I thought of those words that end the first chapter in every Magic Tree House story. Everything was still. Absolutely still. I relaxed until whoosh a huge wind pushed down my block. I was mesmerized by the force of nature, but two thoughts crept into my mind:

1) my kids are still on the highway, 2) get your ass down to the basement, NOW!

After a few minutes in the basement, the power went out. Shortly after I dared to return upstairs my boys arrived home unharmed. I called ComEd only to report out outage and heard this foreboding message. "Several hundred thousand customers" are currently without power. The said they needed 72 hours just to give estimates of when power would return, but warned it could be days before it was restored given the size of the outage. DAYS?!

I called my parents and they invited begged us to come over. On the short drive from our place to theirs, we saw fallen branches everywhere including a huge one that crashed down onto my neighbor's SUV. We later learned that the storm, packing winds of nearly 70 mph, uprooted entire trees.

So, here I am typing from my parents' house, feeling powerless, but enjoying their air conditioning, cable TV broadcast on widescreens, Internet access and a plentiful supply of chocolate. The boys are in heaven. There are few rules at grandma's house, lots of TV time and a chance to play with the Nintendo DS that was banished from our home. They live a few blocks from us, so it's easy to run home and grab extra clothes or, say, discard the rotting contents from our fridge.

This morning, (Day Two) both overexcited and overtired boys (ages 7 and 9) had toddler-like tantrums when we "unplugged" from their videogames, so we decided that they'd had enough of grandma's. Our mini-vacation was fun, but there's no place like home. We'll sleep in our dark house tonight, and have a nervous breakdown re-evaluate tomorrow if the power is still out.

Kim
Hour 53 without electricity
Have you read about Alma's 25-hour blackout? 

Kim also blogs at Hormone-colored Days and Scrambled CAKE