What a wild ride the past few weeks have been!! I know many of you can probably relate to the organized chaos that is the holiday season. Our holiday season got kicked off to a bit of an unexpected start as the week before Thanksgiving the Spokane area saw 70+ mph winds! Now I know if your in Eastern Montana reading this your thinking to yourself, that's just a little breezy, however when your area is filled with 100 foot tall 2000 pound top heavy toothpicks(also known as Ponderosas) I can assure you that little breeze can carry with it quite the punch! The winds blew at that speed for about four hours and in that time countless numbers of trees were either uprooted or snapped off, causing what appeared to be every single power line in the city to be lying on the ground. By the time it was finished, over 200,000 people were without power, roughly 75% of the power companies customers!
The area of Spokane we chose to live in, the South Hill, has so many of these trees it feels almost forest like, the morning after the storm however it felt more apocalyptic! We embraced the outage like we have many others in the past, with a sense of adventure and comments like "this is bad, we could be out of power all day". As I lit a fire the following morning to break the chill, outside temps had dropped to the low 20's at a not so convenient time, we still talked about how this could be kind of fun. Sort of like camping for a few days but a little better cause we had running water. As day one turned into day two, our optimism began to fade some as we had not seen any activity going on in our area, other than the neighbors cutting trees off their houses! Never the less we carried on, little Simba keeping our spirits up with her never ending zest for adventure. As the next couple of days went by we kept watching the core temperature of our house drop along with the temps outside, our fireplace doing less and less each day, eventually we made it to the weekend.
Saturday morning, day four with no power, we started the day with our new routine, fired up the camp stove to boil water for coffee and sat Simba as close to the fireplace as we could for some cheerios and a 42 degree banana. Shortly after finishing her breakfast, Simba started limping, so we took her to urgent care and long story made short returned home four hours later and packed our things to head to the Nagle ranch in search of power and heat! Turns out each of us has our breaking point and ours came that Saturday afternoon:) So we finished out the weekend at Jill and Ryan's, giving Tatum and Simba the best sleepover they could ever imagine! Then on Tuesday morning when Jill and T headed to the airport to fly to Glendive for Thanksgiving, we stayed at their house as day 7 without power passed. We headed to Billings for Thanksgiving ourselves on Wednesday morning, still with no power, and told the kitties to sleep close to each other to conserve heat! Finally Friday morning we got power back to the house and a friend of ours checked on the house to make sure the heat came back on!
This was the longest power outage either one of us has ever gone through and although it was not all fun and games, we were very thankful to have places to go to get out of the cold weather and have a hot shower, some of the finer things in life! We learned quite a bit about ourselves through it all, like cooking by headlamp is far more glamorous when it's not in your own backyard, and that running water doesn't do you much good if the toilet seat is roughly cold enough to make a penguin shiver! As much as we appreciate learning these valuable life lessons, we are even happier to have power and heat at our disposal again! We definitely look at power in a whole new light now.....see what I did there:)
Remember, don't take comfort for advantage, you never know when you'll have to make adjustments to it!
