I Need a Shotgun and a Fishing Pole

The furry little rodent didn’t see his shadow, gets everyone’s hopes up and then what happens? He calls his little fish friend, Nemo. Talk about a bad joke. I don’t care about getting lots of snow, that doesn’t bother me at all. It was the power outage that got my panties in a bunch.

Let’s start at the beginning. I did my big shopping on Friday, Sunday and Monday and when I do, I buy four (yes four) gallons of milk and since Stop and Shop had a coupon for bread I grabbed that too. Now the milk will only last us two, maybe three days tops, so Ted stopped a BJs and bought two more gallons on Wednesday. We were set with bread and milk, and pretty much regular groceries. What I needed were snacks.

Thursday I ran to Aldi and grabbed four assorted bags of “crap” and since I was low on water, two more cases of that. I breezed through that store in minutes, I was impressed. Later that day I had to go pick up a prescription and Ted wanted some soda. I wasn’t going to pay the ridiculous drug store soda price so I ran over to Stop and Shop. WHAT A NIGHTMARE!!

All I needed/wanted was soda. They were out of his Diet Pepsi, so I opted for the gigantic 3 liter of “diet cola” and got myself a diet ginger ale; the lines were insane. I don’t get mad about standing in line, like so many other people were doing. Well, it was your own fault people, you waited until 5:30pm on Thursday to go stock up; the weatherman has been talking about this storm for days…no sympathy for you.

We were ready. We had food; we had gas in the truck and for the snow blower, bring it on. Boy did Nemo bring it. There was no school Friday and as the day went on Maizie started to get nervous. When she gets nervous, she’s doesn’t know how to express it so, she gets mean, nasty and destructive. In order to keep “the calm”, the kids and I tried to watch Hotel Transylvania. The lights kept going out, which meant when they came back on, we had to wait for the cable to reboot. This was a huge stressor on the Kraus couch. We finally get to the end of the movie and it’s time for bed.

You can see the little flickers of panic in the three sets of eyes. “What if the power goes out while we’re sleeping?” “How will you know if you’re asleep?” “What if we wake up?” “What do you usually do when you wake up at night?” “Come to your room.” “So what makes tonight any different?” They all slept together in Maizie’s bed.

All passed out in Maizie's bed

Then it happened. At 1:30am, the power went out. The kids wake up and I yell, “Don’t open the fridge?” Then the cold hits. We have gas heat, but of course it doesn’t work without the power. When I’m cold, I’m less than pleasant. Ted told me it was going to be out for about 6-8 hours. (I really think he makes some stuff up, just so I won’t go postal.)

That's snow and ice on the inside

He had been outside clearing the neighborhood of snow along with the usual hardworking neighbors. I stayed inside and tried to explain why the kids were not going to play outside if there was no heat. We ate all the bags of “crap” for lunch and the kids just made a mess of the house. I didn’t care, I was cold. Later on (about 1 o’clock) we all took a nap Ingalls’s style and when we woke up and there still wasn’t power, I lost all hope. We were going to freeze to death, not really but I was unhappy.

Four blankets listening to The Hobbit

We had peanut butter and jelly for dinner and sat in the living room while Ted read the kids The Hobbit. By 8:30pm, I slipped myself a mickey so I would sleep. All three kids were going to sleep in our bed with me and Ted (volunteering for it) was going to sleep on the couch. By 10pm I had had it, it had to be way below 50 degrees in the house. Our thermostat only goes down to 50 and it was there before the sun went down. We were piling on the comforters, getting cozy.

At 10:30pm I turned to see the time. My other clock was flashing, I couldn’t believe it. I turned and looked at the TV, the little red light was on and the neighbor’s outside light was on…WOO HOO!!! WE HAD POWER!!! I couldn’t believe it, I was so happy. I turned on the Disney channel so the kids could watch TV while they were in bed; it was going to take a while for the house to warm back up.

Being the social media junkie that I am, I jumped right on the computer and started typing. I felt as though I had so much catching up to do.