Our day with Irene

Howdy all! We have internet again! Hurricane Irene knocked our power out for 9 hours, or phone for 3 days, and our internet finally came on late last night.

On Saturday night, it rained, but by Sunday when the winds picked up the rain was already gone. We live on high ground (Compared to the waterfront, that is) so we didn't see any tidal surge. (If we had, half the Cape would've been washed to sea!) So, for us, it wasn't the water - it was the wind.

At around 10:30 AM, the lights flickered, so I put on a pot of rice pilaf. The power went out for good soon after the water boiled. At noon, we ate the rice pilaf, which was still warm, and that was the last hot food we had for the next nine hours. We also had grapes and crackers, and for supper I made peanut butter and honey sandwiches out of hot dog rolls. The fridge and freezer were taped shut so that little fingers or forgetful minds wouldn't accidentally open them.

We took out two board games - Candyland for the Kiddo, and Empire Builder for the grownups. Empire Builder is an epic railroad game. Cloud loves to look at the pictures of trains. He picked the game out for Daddy last Christmas, most likely because he liked the pictures of trains. We like to play it, but it's difficult to play it with guests because it's just too epic.

With the lights out, and no rain outside, and aside from 30-40 mph gusts it being a beautiful day, inevitably we all went outside. We started patrolling our street to look for fallen branches, and we found lots of them. It became part of our routine - play a round of Candyland, take a few turns of Empire Builder, catch the news every half hour on the radio, and then go outside to clear the road of any fallen branches.

After we cleared one intersection of fallen locust branches, two men came along with a camera. They pointed the camera at our new pile of branches by the side of the road.

"You missed it," I said. "These were all on the street. We already cleaned it up."

"Wow, all these were on the street?!" they said.

Well, most of them. Those trees are really brittle.

When dusk arrived, we took out two flashlights and attempted to keep playing our game. Cloud invented his own new game - hog the flashlights. We had candles, too, and eventually we just let him have the flashlights because at least it kept him away from the candles.

The power came on just before bedtime. In the morning Cloud and I went grocery shopping and got enough food to make a nice big hot baked chicken meal, half of which I brought over to our elderly neighbor. It turned out he'd been at his daughter's house and not stranded without power in our neighborhood, but he took the chicken anyway.

Hey, it was good chicken.