Burnin' Down the House

A quick update. Thanks for all the love and well wishes. It means a great deal to me. No power at my Grandmother's house yet. My Mom has power as of 10:00 this morning, but I haven't been able to talk to her because her phone lines went down and they don't have cell reception in the boonies. Our Cable and Internet has been out until 10 minutes ago and not sure if it will stay on.

On a completely unrelated ice storm note, I nearly burned the house down today. Not really, but I could have seriously burned the darn house down. I put a pan on the stove and forgot it. Went outside to talk to a repairman and remembered THE PAN. Ran in to a completely dark house, smoke, crying cats, etc. I was completely freaking out. I threw open the windows and got the smoke out. We set up fans in every window and turned on the A/C fan unit. Really the end result was only soot on the ceiling above the stove and some nasty sooty cobwebby things attaching themselves to the ceiling. I'll have to paint one wall in the kitchen just because soot just smears around, but I was wanting to paint it anyway so I will just look at it like that. One more minute outside and it could have been a tragedy. The cats are fine, the house doesn't smell and if you just don't look up in the kitchen, all is well. That just proved to me how scatterbrained and out of sorts things have been lately. I cook all the time and never forget a pan. I haven't cooked all week and I have forgotten everything. Normalcy please!

After I dealt with that, I realized that there was cold air blowing full force out of the furnace vents. Oh. come. on. One call to the Heating guy and he came over at 7:00m pm tonight and he fixed it. I thought I had sooted it up or something. But, luckily or not so luckily, he said the sudden power surges had been doing this to heat pumps all over town. He fixed it and it warmed right back up again.

Pretty much everything melted away today. Tomorrow I have a guy (actually the heating dude on his day off) coming to clean up the yard and someone else on Sunday to fix the punctured hole in the roof. The insurance adjuster said that someone would be out in a day or two to look at the damage. I said, "May I ask where you are?" "Cincinnati, Ohio", she responded. I thought so because there are 100,000 homes in disarray and I know there is no freakin' way anyone will be "at my house in a couple of days". Then she suggested that maybe I should take photos and get things cleaned up. Uh, ya think?

In the midst of all this today, I received a package from a swap from December. My partner has some difficulties with the shipping and it kept coming back to her. It arrived today full pink Christmas vintage-y goodness and was really a bright spot in an otherwise crap-ola week. So, maybe that's why it never came - because I really needed it today. Thank you Joanne - I will properly thank you when I feel that my Internet will stay on for more than ten minutes!

Only I would take a photo of the Salvation Army Thrift Store in the middle of an ice storm. The Breadman's place of employment is actually right next door and we had to go see what they wanted him to do the next day. Plus, the stores were closed and that is the mecca of all things bread and donutty. You need Chocolate Donettes in an ice storm. You do!

This plane flew over the house yesterday and I begged for it to land and take me somewhere tropical, but to no avail. That's okay, I'll just assume it was Oceanic 815.

I'll be back when and if I can. Thanks again to everyone and to those in the same boat - I feel for ya! And, please let tomorrow be a regular old day!