Praise the Lord!

Our electricity finally came back on Thursday evening. It was a surprise blessing. We weren't expecting it back until yesterday or today. It was out for a total of 9 days, 7 1/2 hours! God took great care of us! We were definately blessed during this time. Unaware that this storm was on it's way, I started cooking like crazy, stocking my freezer, about two weeks before the storm hit. We have a gas stove so we had lots of great food to eat! For the first few days, we kept the house warm with our wood burning stove. We pulled all our mattresses into the family room and basicly lived there. We were able to borrow a generator and Jaime connected the whole house to it so, for the most part, we were able to live normal after that. I just had to turn off the heat to use the washing machine or coffee maker, make sure we didn't have too many lights on at once, and the microwave and dryer were off limits. I must say, if it wasn't for my time in Honduras I probably would have struggled through those 9 days. In my four years down there I got used to the power going out unexpectedly and having no idea when it might be back on, living without using a dryer (I had one, but chose not to use it most of the time), and learning to improvise during times such as these. It has been a little strange trying to get back into the swing of things now that the power is back. I've let so much slide (mostly laundry and house cleaning). I have a ton of laundry to catch up on and I'm trying to do some more cooking to stock my freezer again.

Here are some picture from our yard during the storm.

Ice, ice, ice.

Solid ice around everything.

We couldn't get into our cars!

Poor tree.

The branch that took out our electricity line.

An inch of ice!

The next morning.

Trying to save our peach tree.

The kids coloring by candlelight.