Day After Irene - written 8/29

8:40am We still have no power. The trash men woke me up. I guess that's good, at least they can make it through the roads. I slept like crap. No a/c to control the temperature. It was so humid. I'd get cold and cover up, get hot then toss the covers off. It was back and forth like that all night. I think I figured out a way to check the freezer, we'll find out later. It's amazing how much water you use especially to flush the toilets. One 5 gallon jug is only enough to flush a toilet two times. We've already gone through 8 gallons of water, that leaves us with one 5 gallon jug of toilet water.

9:30am Call to the electric company recording says a week or longer without power. We don't have anywhere near enough water to go that long. Going to head out to see if the local public campgrounds have water, or we'll just fill them in the pond for toilet water. :(

9:48am Oldest child still has program. She'll get to go somewhere where there's power. Hopefully she'll get to eat something there too.

11:00am Found water at the schools outdoor high pressured spout. :) We went down in town and they will have power tonight but because we don't live "in town" we don't have public utilities and there for won't have power for the week or longer. My thought is: What the hell do I pay taxes to the "town" for then? I don't get anything out of it. I pay the same if not more than the people that live "in town" do and I don't get a darn thing from it....no utilities, no public trash, sewer or water, no staffed fire department or police. All we get is a crappy school system. :( (sorry I'm done venting for now) Good news...my parents found us a generator :) We won't loose everything :) 4:12pm Wow, just wow! What a day it's been. We cleaned up some of the front yard till my parents came with the generator. It won't run the well pump :( but at least it will run the fridge and the chest freezer. Dad and I went out to get gas and new gas cans. Ha. That was funny. We found a 5 gallon kerosene can, which we spray painted red so we could use it for gas, and a 2 gallon gas can. Then the fun started...trying to find gas. Every gas station we went to had signs on the pump that read "Sorry no gas."
We finally found two stations a ways up the highway that had gas. The lines for the pumps were so long that there were cars out in the roads. One station next to us was actually getting a shipment as the gas station we were in line for was getting signs read to to put on the pumps. We were luck though and managed to get gas before they did run out. Back home the generator is up and running. We saved the food! No water, but we saved the food!!! (can you tell I'm happy about that?) Good thing to for the generator because the freezer was up to 39°F this morning.

8:05pm Put the kids to bed. I have to say that my parents are great and I don't know what I would do with out them. Not only did they get the wonderful generator but they gave us money to go get dinner. :) We drove south to the actual shore (about 15 minutes away.) It surprisingly didn't look to bad where we were. Stopped at Five Guys so we wisely used moms money to fill to the brim on burgers, bacon cheese hot dogs, and fries; because who knows when the next hot food we'll have will be.


8:54pm OMG! I've just seen the biggest fail known to man. The electric company has a text for update thing so I text it with the zip code. The idea is you get a text back with the updates on outages in your area and information about the outage such as restoration times.........ummm....yeah. I got the following text back: "There are no power outages reported in your area." Are you freaking kidding me!? We've only reported it like hundred billion times. Like I'm sitting in the dark with candles and a generator for the fun of it.

Day Irene Hits - written 8/28

I thought it was going to go really well. Before I fell asleep last night we lost cable but it came back on as I briefly woke up and heard the television back on. This apparently did not last long, as I awoke at 6:34am with no power. Wonderful. At least the kids were still asleep. I took a walk around the inside of the house, no noticeable damage to the house that I could see. I grabbed my daughters radio so we could get some sort of news. Okay tornado watch - they tell us on the radio to look to the sky - sure let me go stand outside in the middle of the hurricane to see if anything is coming...nah I think I'll pass. New reports those without power can be without it for up to five days. Ummm...I don't think the fridge and freezers will stall that long and I don't know what to do. I can't afford to replace two freezers and the fridge. We have a ton of CSA chickens, about 10 in all, and it sucks thinking about loosing all of it.

10:00am The winds outside are so strong you can actually see the wind with all the rain and tree debris it's carrying. We've been hearing trees falling all morning. At last count we've lost 4 trees and an old CB antenna. The kids are finally up and complaining that they have nothing to do. Kids these days don't know how to live without technology. The older child has mental problems and doesn't understand the situation. She insists on playing the Wii (Can you tell they've never been without power before?) and was wondering why all the leaves and branches were in the yard, amazed by the amount of them. I tell them to color, draw, do word find books or puzzle books, play dolls, and read. They have plenty to do but they come back with the "that's boring." They should have grown up when I did.

12:30pm Peanut butter and fluff for lunch. Thinking that the eye must be past us by now but the winds are still strong. We went outside to take a few pictures and still hear trees falling. Hubby said that it looks like a tree sneezed on us with all the bit of leaves and branches ever where. Silly hubby. We did see an electric company car drive by, maybe we will get power back sooner than expected...one can only hope. Kids are holding up. It's been about 8 hours since we lost power.

1:00pm Flipped on the radio quickly to check on things.. Good new: The closest city to us just got power back, which is good because if we need anything we know where to go. Bad news: Our electric company has over half it's customers with out power. :(

4:30pm Going out for a drive to see where there is power.

7:10pm Back from our drive. It really doesn't look good. Up the road trees on lines and down the road trees on lines. I took some pictures of some of the things we saw. Tree across a bridge = bridge closed, down lines sparking. There are trees and lines down every where. The closest place we found with power is about twenty minutes away. One of the grocery stores in the city was open so we stopped in an bought 5 bags of ice. Dinner was breakfast sandwiches from a Dunkin Doughnuts we found with power. Got home an put everything we wanted to keep from the fridge into coolers with the ice. The kids are afraid to go to bed without nightlight so I gave them each two glow bracelets I found an a book light. The news now says a week or so until they expect to get power back to everyone...I wish I knew what to do. There are 650,000 customers with out power.



7:40pm It's starting to get dark. We lit some candles and shut off the lantern, we don't want to run the batteries out...We're usually up till 1 am, that's 4-5 more hours...I might go insane from the boredom.

8:37pm The boredom in the dark is so bad the hubby's changing lyrics to songs so they are about how we have no electricity.

Day before Irene - writen 8/27

The outer bands of the hurricane are just touching where we are even though the eye is still by the Carolinas. So what's there to do today...well there's making Italian squash and canning it. I need to do this before all my veggies go bad. What's Italian squash? It's a whole bunch of things thrown into a pot and cooked down to almost stew.

Italian Squash
Zucchini - 3 sliced cut in half if the rounds are to big
Yellow Squash - 4 cut same as the zucchini (I use more of these because I like them better :P )
Onion - 1
Garlic - 2 normal cloves or I used 1 elephant garlic clove because it was about equal to 2 normal cloves.
Green or Red Bell Pepper - 1 which ever you prefer
Tons of tomatoes - I think I used about 20 - peeled seeded and chopped
Bazil - 1 sprig
Italian Seasoning, Salt and Pepper to taste

Saute onion and garlic in a little olive oil till the onion is translucent. Add everything else and cook it until the squash is tender. Season to taste. It comes out like a stew and it's yummy.

I made a giant pot of this and ended up canning 7 jars and eating a small bowl. Once those were in the jars we sat outside between the rain bands shucking corn, 10 ears total. I took the corn off the cob and put it into 3 freezer containers.
With the food making out of the way we then had to finish getting ready for the storm. We filled three 5 gallon jugs with tap water and a gallon jug for a total of 23 gallons of water. We have been told that if we loose power it could be for a few days.

As we go into the night time the hurricane is approaching. Rain and wind is picking up. We've had to shovel the water from the walk a few times now. So far things are looking okay as far as the flooding goes. Time to move the kiddos downstairs on the couches and head to bed.

Preparation - Written on 8/26

Preparation: The first phase before any big storm hits, is getting ready and being prepared. For us this took us two whole days of running around and digging. Digging? Yep digging. We have a few flooding problems. :S

Problem 1: A mole dug up under one of the window wells to the basement windows.
Solution: Replace the window well with a new larger (going deeper into ground) composite window well. For this we dug out the old metal one and then had to dig down about arms lenght to get the new one into the ground. We put all the dirt back.
Result: Sore body and still flooding. :(
Solution 2: A 40 lb. bag of dirt to regrade the land around the window well. Amazing how it never seems that the dirt you dug out is enough to put back.
Result 2: So far so good.

Problem 2: Run off from the roof has warn a small ditch in the flower bed where the river rock is and it causes flooding in that part of the yard.
Solution: Two days before the hurricane starts put in a french drain- more digging. This we kind of just did with no real rhyme or reason as to how it's suppose to be done. We dug a trench about 1 foot wide by 18-24 inches deep and 25 feet in length. (This made me really just want to go out and buy a small back hoe. I'm sure I could find other uses for it too.) For those who don't know New England, especially my yard, has very rocky soil. That combined with tree roots made this an especially tough and long day.
Result: Praying it works.

Problem 3: (Geesh, I know. I think this is the last one.) It's kind of the same as problem 2. Run off from the roof on the concrete walkway foods the walk and it will come up over the box of the house and into the basement.
Solution: Short term- (10) 40lb. bags of top soil. (Hey, it's cheaper than play sand and sand bags.)
Long term - Lay some new cement down to regrade the walk away from the house.
Result: Short term - Praying it holds back all the water we're suppose to get. So far we've been shoveling the pooling water out into the yard. :S

That's it. So outside of digging and dirt bagging (hehe, because we used dirt bags instead of sand bags.) It took us 3 stores to find batteries. We got 2 packs of D's that were the last ones anywhere. Bought 7 gallons of drinking water and some canned goods to eat if we loose power.

Hurricane Irene Journaled

I lost power six days ago and finally got power back about 2 hours ago.  The hurricane knocked out power to half of Connecticut and it's taken forever to get power back. To deal with the loss of power and to keep myself from completely going insane from it I journal-ed about our experiences. I will be taking time over the next week or so to post my journal here and share this experience with you, from the getting ready and preparation phases, to during the storm, following the storm, the aftermath and what I learned and took from this whole ordeal, along with pictures of the aftermath.  I will share my frustrations and laughter with you.