Day 5

Wow- some people here have been without power now for 5 days, some reaching 6, depending on when they lost it last week. Our main power company is the brunt of most people's anger, claiming they are acting too slowly. I am middle-of-the-road myself, as always (I like to argue both sides):

On one hand, I can understand that being without power blows hard. We were out from sometime Thursday morning to 3:30pm Saturday, so don't think I haven't gained perspective on it. After all, I am still suffering from winter cold #2 due to the apartment temperature during the outage. Though, I have to applaud taking vitamins... I would be much worse if not for my multi-vitamin and vitamin C! When I feel myself getting sick, I'll chow down extra vitamin C, and every time I do, my colds are about half as bad as normal.

On the other hand, there were over 350,000 buildings without power, which adds up to about 650,000-700,000 people. I doubt that it was mathematically possible to get everyone back up immediately when you're looking at it from that angle. It's not like power was just OFF. Poles had fallen over, traffic lights were laying in the middle of intersections, cars drove over power lines that had fallen, transformers blew (some to pieces, I've heard), etc etc. I even saw a picture of one pole that had been ripped in half and the top of it was hanging from the line over a road near Mom and Dad's house.

We've had out-of-state power companies coming in to help, but there's only so much they can do at a time. We can look at it either like this: "the lines should be buried already and we wouldn't have had so much trouble" or this: "deal with the problem at hand, not with what we should have done".

If people ever thought ice was a minor weather issue, take a look and think again.

All of my grandparents finally got power on Monday night. It blows that they were the last in the family to get power, but were the ones who needed it the most.

Oh yeah, and my co-worker's house as of 10:39AM today STILL has a tree and a power line laying on it. He can't go home, and this is day 5.
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Good note: One of the sales divisions brought me and co-worker cookies! Usually, it's an entire department thing, but this time, it's just us!

Other good note: My jaw is finally feeling better. The tooth never hurt, it's just that the dentist gave me so many shots that I couldn't open my mouth all the way (much to some people's delight LOL). I can't chew on my left side, though, b/c I am not allowed to floss. I opened my big mouth and told them the tooth had been hurting, so they put on a medicated filling first, then will fill it permanently later on in January. I am ALREADY tired of chewing on my left side, and it has only been a week LOL.

Other other good note: I found an all-in-one hand-crank radio/cellphone charger/flashlight/emergency weatherband for $50.00 at Bed, Bath & Beyond. They were highly scarce last week and expensive, so finding one now was a blessing. That's exactly what we needed last week: cellphone battery power, a flashlight, and a freakin' outlet to the outside world. At least we'll be prepared next time, right? You just watch - I won't be able to find it when I need it LOL... normal Carri.

Maybe more later - I still owe you some pictures. :)