Be Less Boring

I woke up at my usual time today.  The yard was full of limbs and mud, and there's still a brook running through the back yard, but it only takes a short walk down the street to see how things could have been much worse.  Trees are down all over town.  Something in excess of 300,000 people were without power at that hour, but we hadn't lost it.

As is my luck, I had scheduled a vacation day today but lack of power forced my employer to close for the day.  I had an appointment to get some work done on my car at 8 a.m.  I got there early to make sure I was the first one in but they had no power and couldn't even reschedule me because their computers were all down.  Still, I'm doing better than the service manager there.  She said her truck was crushed by a fallen limb during the night.  I'll have to call back and reschedule.  Then take some more time off to take care of it.

I needed some things at the grocery store and to make a deposit at the bank.  The bank was a piece of cake, except for the weird dude who decided to stand right next to me at the desk while I was filling out my deposit slip.  Where he was annoyed me because he'd have had a perfect view of my information.  I slammed down the pen, moved over to the other desk and finished up.  When I turned around, he apologized saying he didn't realize there was another desk because he was new to that bank.  Open your eyes, weirdo.

Then I tried to get to the grocery store, but found the road detoured and traffic backed up on all of the alternate routes.   What's normally less than a five minute drive turned into something closer to half an hour.

As I was unloading the groceries from the car, I was informed that effervescent daughter would be arriving from her dad's house because we had power and he didn't.  Ten minutes after she arrived, the power went out here.  I don't know why.  The storm was long over by then.  The winds had died down to nothing.  The rain had stopped.  The sun had briefly appeared.  So, we're blaming the girl because there are no other obvious explanations.   Power was probably out for a couple of hours or so, but is obviously back now.  The neighbor across the street had his excruciatingly loud generator going the whole time.

I went out and picked up the limbs from the yard and the roof.  It made quite a nice pile that may just provide all the kindling I need for the wood stove next winter.  There's an awful lot of mud out there and still a steady stream of water bubbling up from a spring near the shed and flowing down the far side of the back yard.   It's going to take some work this spring to get things looking reasonably good again.

After lunch I took a nap, from which I've only just recently awoken.  Power and Internet were back, so that's good.  There are those who have threatened to take me out tonight, if anything is open, so further adventures may be forthcoming.   Then again, maybe I've had enough adventure for one day.

Happy birthday to Olympic gold medalist and fellow New Hampshire native, Hannah Kearney.  And happy birthday to me.