Why I haven't blogged......

I have had a few people mention to me that they wondered where I went. This blog will explain everything.

This winter in Michigan has been pretty out of the norm. For awhile I thought we wouldn't see temps below 50! Sunday night the news warned us of an ice storm, it wasn't too bad, just lost power a couple times and we lost our cable and internet which ended up not returning untile Tuesday night. The ice covering the trees that next day was just beautiful!

Monday was a holiday so I had the day off of work to do some grocery shopping that needed to be done. We were having our good friends Rubel and Myra Shelly over for dinner that night. A couple times during the day, our power went out, but I kept getting things ready, cooking most things ahead of time while I had power.

The Shellys were late, when they got here, they said that our street, and 4 other streets were blocked off with caution tape and no one had power except for our house.....I looked outside, sure enough, everyone was black except for us! I even heard a generator running somewhere.

We ate, laughed and talked for a couple hours until they needed to return home, when I looked down our street again, everything was still dark. (I am sure our neighbors hated us at this point!) Not two seconds after they pulled out of our driveway, our lights slowly dimmed until they were out. We thought this was pretty funny, but other than that weren't worried. We read and did puzzles by candle light and took a walk down the street to see why there was caution tape up.....there was a power line laying in our street!

I called DTE and they weren't sure when the power would come on so we just assumed with a down wire it would be through the night. We went to bed around our usual time, planning on getting up early to unhook the garage door and drive to Lifetime in order to get ready for work.

In the morning, I was outside pulling the garage door up, and I saw a lady walking in the street, I asked her if she was doing ok and she had this overwhelmed look on her face and said "I don't know what to do, my house is flooding and I can't get it to stop." I didn't even say anything, but ran to our basement and down the stairs, falling into cold water that was rising at a good speed. I cried for Josh and he came to help me, there was no time to cry or be upset, we just had to get things out as fast as we could before everything was ruined. (This was one of the most surreal experiences....when you see items that you own floating and bobbing up and down in water).

The biggest problem we faced was that since we didn't have electricity, the sump pump would not run, causing water to pour into our basement. Without electricity, we couldn't get a wet-vac to start getting water out. So, we had to call an emergency service to come help us get the water out. At this point, there was about 8 inches of water surrounding our furnace which was worrying us quite a bit.

Insurance doesn't cover water damage, so at the end of the day, we were still without power, our house was 46 degrees inside, 2 companies and 1 generator later, and a chunk of money gone, we reminded ourselves that it could have been worse. Two of our neighbors and a good friend of ours had trees hit or go through their house along with the flooding, and some of our elderly neighbors had to have ambulances to help them with oxygen. Tuesday night we got power back and started the clean-up process. I have done about 12 loads of laundry and have things laying out drying all over, and I just know that the trash company loved my heap of trash by the street this morning!

So, that is where I have been!