What a week

I know this is old news now, but the ice storm last week deprived us of power for several days, then I discovered that my computer had died a painful death, we took off for a weekend in Branson, and in general, it's been like a thousand degrees of crazy around here.

So, pardon me while I relive the drama of our ice storm.

We live in an older neighborhood of homes that are 30-40 years old. We have lots of well-established big trees, and they were not happy under the weight of so much ice. The sleet started on Monday afternoon, and by the next day, it sounded like a war zone in my neighborhood. Even indoors, I could hear the trees groaning under the weight of so much ice before they gave up their limbs. It was the creepiest thing I've experienced in a long time. At one point, something VERY LARGE fell on the roof over the office, and I heard one of my daughters scream. I was just sure something had broken through into the house. Thank God, that wasn't the case.

One of our neighbors lost a particularly large section of tree right outside their garage.



We camped out two nights in front of the fireplace. This was the first night playing Scrabble by candlelight.



I ventured into the hospital at 5:45 a.m. on Wednesday since I couldn't work from home. This is a view of the fountain area where many hospital employees enjoy eating in prettier weather.



Since we couldn't cook on our electric stove, Jeff snagged a bottle of propane soon after the outage so we could grill. We had a "discussion" on Tuesday about whether it was okay to put Pyrex on the grill (I didn't recommend it; he disagreed). We successfully warmed up a casserole for Tuesday night's dinner, but on Wednesday night when he tried to cook enchiladas, this was the result:



He cooked a great breakfast for us on the grill Thursday morning. What a great way to celebrate his 39th birthday!