Lights Out!

Whee! Back again.

We had an interesting week. Monday evening it snowed. Tuesday it started in with a variety of stuff - sleet, freezing rain, ice pellets (noticing a theme here?). Wednesday was more of the same - only more so. Wednesday afternoon about 1, our lights went out. And stayed out. And stayed out some more. We lit a fire in the fireplace and huddled up as the house temp started sinking. Poor Rob hit the deck several times hauling firewood up to the back porch from our backyard stack.

No power also meant that the aerators in the fish tanks weren't working, so the fish were suffocating. So about every four hours, we would siphon out a bunch of water, and dump in new water so the fish could breathe, at least a little. Between the cold and the lack of oxygen, they were not happy fish.

Rob went in to work on Wed. - it turned out that outside of our immediate neighborhood, the streets were in decent shape, so we were able to go get battery-powered aerators for the tanks, and pick up some take-out food, but the power company was saying that we wouldn't get power back until 11pm Saturday, so we packed up and headed for Nashville, only to have Rob call us just as we hit the halfway point, and say the power was back on. So back we came.

Central heat feels unbelievably luxurious right now. And the effort with the fish tanks paid off - we only lost one fish (one of Aaron's pack of three silver dollars). Even the worst off of the rest (my iridescent shark, who was solidly upside-down and twitching), recovered rapidly once the tank systems came back on-line.

One good side effect, since it's a good low-light activity, I pulled out my spinning wheel and got it ready to roll again. I even got about half a spindle-full of soda bottle fiber spun (sock weight).

Right now we're waiting to see if the boys' school (which was being used as an emergency shelter), will be open on Monday, or if they get to stay home a little more. I hope they can go, they're getting a bit tired of each other right now.