It seems like only yesterday but at the same time, it seems like a distant memory. It was one year ago this weekend that we had a massive ice storm that paralyzed the city for over two weeks and gave us all a new appreciation for electricity and heat. That Friday, the storm had been predicted as sleet and ice, but I don’t remember anything about accumulation. I do remember tearing up our bathroom floor with the help of friend, Kevin French, in anticipation of getting the floor tiled during the weekend. Steve called from Lowe’s to inform us that it was sleeting and getting really nasty. At this point, Kevin and I had the entire floor up (well, Kevin did most of it) and were waiting for Steve to come home with the subfloor and backerboard. At one point, we got Kevin’s wife, Valerie, and all went to dinner. The plan was to finish the subfloor that night and get the tiling started on Saturday. Then the electricity went off at 8:40 p.m. and didn’t return for nine days. We were among the lucky ones. A friend had left us the keys to his empty home, which never lost power, and we bunked there during the outage. The temperature in our house fell to 29 degrees during that time and we lost all the food out of our freezer and refrigerator due to poor planning (we could have taken it to the other house, but never got around to it), but we were warm and safe.
The power returned but we were still faced with a destroyed bathroom, a messy house, an empty ‘fridge, a yard to clean and another house to clean where we’d stayed. It was weeks before we felt normal.
This year, January gave us a massive storm filled with tornadoes but power was only out for 4 hours. But that was one night and we survived. All this drama gives us a perspective on what’s important. We have our family and friends who stayed safe during both events and that’s really all that matters.
Pretty Pretty Bang Bang 