Crocheting by the Dimming Booklight

Ouf! What a weekend.

It started out mild enough. Mark and I headed to Pittsburgh, he to the annual Chachula Golf outing and me to the Chachula Women's Weekend. I got to hang out with my sister-in-laws and nieces and mother-in-law. We went shopping were I picked up a lot of inspiration for new designs. And we went to Wicked! (all I have to say is that the costumes were worth it alone- Amazing!) I got another sock crocheted and another one started (better pics coming soon) for my class in Denver next Friday.

While heading home, we thought the weather was a little funny since it was kinda windy. About an hour into it, we thought "Hmm, this is really really windy", and checked the weather on the radio. Announcer said, "High wind warning, stay inside, only travel if totally necessary." Hmm, that's weird we thought. Well, after calling a few friends to figure out what was going on. Turns out that we had driven through Ike on our way home to Cincinnati (I would not recommend that to anyone- it was like being on a roller coaster for 3 hours). This we figured out after we had driven through, so we kept on going home. We found out from the radio that over half the population of the area was without power. So we were not surprised at all that we came home to a dark house.

What we found out though, was that we were incredibly lucky! Our back door was blocked, we found out, by a tree that must have hit the house and settled against the back door. Another hit the deck, broke some decking boards, and sailed into the yard. Two more fell in the backyard, and only minorly damaged our fences. The luck part was that neither us nor our neighbor (she's like 10 ft from us) had any real damage from these guys. Amazing!

So Sunday night, we pulled out all the candles (some from Hanukkah, some were Shabbot candles, some from Christmas) and we settled in for a peaceful night. Yesterday, we pulled the trees out of the way, and started the massive clean-up of the millions of branches (etc) in the yard. (and ouf am I sore today!) Faye was a big helper in breaking all the large branches into tiny pieces for me. We got power back, and I was able to save some stuff from the frig; and threw out the rest. Most people are still without power today (esp the farther you get from downtown). We just feel so lucky that we only have an empty frig and sore backs from Ike.