Winter Storm …  Sunday, January 5 – Thursday, January 8, 2014

The storm was set to begin late Saturday or early Sunday morning. Six to 12″ of snow with wind chill up to minus 50 degrees.  Media issued a constant stream of warnings… I had heard a lot of warnings in the past few decades.

Jill began texting me and Jan Saturday morning    Snow supposed to start at 7:30.  Getting my emergency action plan ready.  What are you going to do if the power goes out?  Do you have firewood?  Enough bottled water if the heat doesn’t work?  Jan will be okay, she doesn’t shower.  Leave the faucets dripping.  Do you have high protein food that doesn’t need to be cooked if the power goes out?  What if the power goes out and it’s minus 45 degrees?  Fill your gas tanks.  Better to have a plan and not need it than no plan and die!  I have a big headache right now.  Means the snow is coming.  I can predict weather with my brain.  Snowpocolypse is coming.
Jan’s response: OMG I’m going to shower so I don’t have to the rest of the week.  I have no food, no gas, no plan.  We’ll probably just die…surviving sounds too hard.
Me:  I’ll buy milk.

By Sunday morning, Jan and I were listening to Jill and the storm warnings.  Snow was falling fast.  This would be a record breaking storm; talked about for decades.  Jill asked Jan what she was going to do if her heat went out and her car wouldn’t start or she was unable to drive?  What about your kids?

Sunday morning, Jan and Chris come to my house because they often lose power and their car stays outside.  My underground power lines made my house appear safer. The plan was to put my car in the driveway and Jan’s SUV in my garage. I knew that wouldn’t go unnoticed so I told my neighbor, Mary Ann, our plans.

Jan, Chris, the kids, and both pugs arrived around 11 a.m. on Sunday.  The snow continued to fall and the temperature began to quickly drop.  We played in the snow before the deep freeze.

           

I loved having Jan, Chris, the kids and pugs here for 2 days. They brought lots of food.  Both are great cooks. We pretended it was a vacation. We ate and watched movies and played games and ate and took crash naps and then ate some more. We texted with Jill non-stop and threw in some Facetime.

     

I’m sure Jan and Chris would have preferred to be home, but the kids and I loved it.  On Monday evening when Chris decided they were safe to return home, the kids and I were disappointed.  They voiced it.  I didn’t.  It was time for them to go…  Adults want to be in their own home.  Chris cleaned the snow from my car, packed up their car, returned my car to the garage, and they headed home at 5:30.  I gave them a snow shovel and a down comforter for the kids if they should get stuck trying to get home.

  They didn’t get stuck in the snow and the kids didn’t get the comforter.  Newman had a nice ride home.

At 5:40, ten minutes after Jan left, Mary Ann called to see if I was okay since my car was missing from the driveway. It’s nice to know someone’s always watching.  I live in a great neighborhood full of nosey neighbors who want to help.  While the kids were here, we needed ketchup for the their French fries, so I tried to borrow some.  The neighbor I called didn’t have any.  She called another neighbor without telling me, who hiked through 12 inches of snow to deliver it to our front door.

Jan and Chris arrived home safe and warm; Henry with his new dice and Ruth with her new makeup, which is always applied to her left eye.  Jan thanked me for helping Ruth look abused.

It’s Tuesday evening and our city is still cold.  Too cold for the salt to work on the roads.  The office is closed again Wednesday and my gym is closed because of frozen pipes.  I’m one of the lucky ones not forced to go out,  but still antsy hanging out at home.  The house is back to normal, laundry finished, not much else needs to be done…  I’m writing, playing on the internet, and looking forward to Spring.  Right now, anything above 30 degrees will feel like Spring.