Like Robinson Crusoe...as primative as can be.

Ah the joys of spending a week without power.  If you're my age or older the title of this post should have brought to mind the theme from Gilligan's Island.  That has been the state of my life for the past week or so.   If you’re a fellow New Englander, you know exactly what I’m talking about.  

 It started on Friday October 28^th.  I was aware we were supposed to get some snow, but twelve inches before Halloween is a rare thing.  I took it somewhat seriously, but not really.  I got home from work and did some basic preparation.  This includes bringing in a couple days worth of firewood into the garage, covering the fire-pit with a tarp and bringing in the tiki torches; so long autumn.

At 5 p.m. I discovered we had a leaking furnace.  I started the mop-up and had my “furnace guy” on the phone when the power went out.  The good news was that without electricity, the burner couldn’t fire and therefore the leak problem had solved itself, for now..  The bad news was…well…the power was out.  I was shocked that there was only about a quarter of an inch of snow on the ground at the moment the lights went out.  I thought this was New Hampshire, not Florida. 

We grilled, we ran the wood stove and skipped showers.  My little Coleman camp stove is a late-night life saver.  The kids ran around in the dark with their flashlights as they always do until somebody falls and cries.  At times like these I always hear my mom’s voice, “It’s all fun and games until somebody gets hurt!” and I choose not to regurgitate that line from my childhood.  Instead I just dry the tears and ask, “What did you learn?”  My hope is that it will help the lesson sink-in instead of just being brushed aside.  It doesn’t seam to be working yet, but I’m hopeful.

The next morning revealed about 20 inches of snow, and trees snapped in half everyplace.  It wasn’t the light fluffy stuff either.  This stuff was wet and heavy.  It stuck to the autumn leaves and pulled the trees down with a vengeance.  We lost six trees in our yard alone.  One of them was across the driveway.  It was described by one reported as “absolute tree carnage.” 

My back yard looked like the frozen version of Narnia. If you look at the hand rail on the back deck you can almost get an idea of how much snow we got.

As the day passed (and my shoveling muscles inflamed) it became evident that the power-line situation was really bad.  Electricity wasn’t coming back any time soon and even the local cell towers were not functioning.  I’m also in a town that has no municipal water department and every house has a private water well.  Without electricity those water pumps don’t function.  This means no lights, no stove, no water, no toilets, no phones and no cell phones.  We’ve been through this before (minus the cell phone issue) but only for a couple of days. All the tree damage to the power lines was overwhelming. 

Another blow was dealt when the temperature climbed into the fifties the next day.  The content of my fridge usually survives these outages on my back deck while packed in snow, but not this time.  Over the course of the week we lost over $300 in frozen foods. 

On the second or third night my wife fell asleep in front of the wood stove with the door open and almost burned the house down.  –sigh.

I eventually started lugging in buckets of water from the farm down the road.  They had a generator and were kind enough to let us draw water from the hose in their horse corral.  This allowed us to flush the toilets, wash the out of control stack of dishes and de-funk our bodies.  The wood stove did a good job of heating the water as well as provide us with toast, bacon, eggs, soups, pasta and waffles.

On day five the lights came back on.  Normally this is when I stop to relax, but now I had a leaking furnace to deal with.  Turns out the expansion tank failed; in lay-terms that means $400 . 

I heard on the news today that parts of New Hampshire will not have power until the 11th.  Poor bastards!   I hope everyone’s week was better than mine! 

The last month...

I'm happy to report that my little girl is doing fine.  Every once in a while she says, "I really miss Scout."  But she has dealt with her feelings and moved on. I'm so proud of her. 

We have have picked up two new kittens recently and they get along fine with our dog, Patch.  But our veteran cat of 8+ years is less than thrilled.  We decided to let my son name the gray one and let my daughter name the tiger one.  They chose the names "Gray" & "Tiger."  It looks like I'm going to have to enroll them in some sort of activity that promotes creative thinking.

Here they are stalking the dog...

Here is Tiger playing with the dog's tail...

Here's poor Patch passed out after entertaining the kittens all day...

In other news, I took second place in my humorous speech contest.  Not bad for my first time out of the gate.  I plan on spending the rest of this year working with a mentor to improve my writing and technique.  See if I can't do better next year.

Work, Speeches and Dying Ponies.

I haven’t blogged in a while.  No excuses; I just haven’t.  I do have a life you know!  A life that’s full.  Between being a scout leader, working, commuting and helping kids with homework I’m a little pressed for time.  My new endeavor is competitive public speaking.  In fact I’m entered to give my first speech tonight, at the club’s annual humorous speech competition.

The sad news is that my daughter’s pony passed away last weekend.  He coliced sometime during the night, my wife had the veterinarian there by 9:30 a.m. but it was too late.  He was a halflinger/Shetland cross and had an awesome temperament.  His name was Scout and he was a GREAT pony.  I was sad that the horse died, but seeing the tears run down my little girl’s face was almost more than I could stand.  I held her in my arms for hours while she sobbed.  It’s a tough lesson that all kids have to learn; I just wish she didn’t have to learn it so soon.  She’s only eight years old.  She spent Sunday night crying and didn’t fall asleep until 2:00 a.m.  Going to school the next day was obviously out of the question.  She’s doing better now and things are kind of back to normal.  I’m just wondering how she’s going to handle the empty stall in the barn when she goes out there this weekend. 

Hurricane Irene

The hurricane is gone and everything is drying out.  We’ve been without power since 10:00 am on Sunday morning and they’re saying one or two more days before it’s on (I’m writing this from work.) 

The preparations were simple:

1)      Fill the tub with water.  This allows us to have water for flushing toilets, washing dishes and eliminating bed-head.

2)      Take down the swings.  You don’t want any metal chains flying around in 60 mph winds.

3)      Flip the picnic table over (that’s where it’s going to end up anyway.)

4)      Take down all the little things like the flag, the hanging plants on the front porch, the hummingbird feeder and bring in the garden gnome.

5)      Do the dishes and laundry.  We have a private well and when the power goes out we have no water.  I hate starting a power outage while I’m already “in the red” so to speak.

6)      Candle and flashlight check.

7)      Get the Coleman stove ready to go.

8)  And of course, get some shelf-stable food and fill a few jugs of drinking water.

9)  Relax and watch the family panic.

It wasn't until late afternoon that I had to make the hardest decision of all: what foods to put in the cooler (on ice) and what foods to let go bad.  I just bought the strawberries and blueberries so those go in the cooler.  The milk is half gone and the jug is huge, let it die.  I did this until the cooler was full.  Goodbye Ah-So sauce.  I always say that losing power in the winter is better than losing it in the summer.  For starters, the windows are already shut and the house doesn’t turn into a stuffy oven when you close them all.  Second, the wood stove heats the house.  Third, I just throw all our food out onto the back deck and pack it in snow.  I’ve never lost any food during a blizzard.  These summer outages just suck!

The kids enjoyed watching the storm.  The trees whipping back and forth, rain coming down in sheets and branches falling from the sky.  My daughter didn't quite get the no electricity thing.  I told her she couldn't watch a DVD on the living room TV because the TV & DVD player won't work without electricity.  She said, "That's OK, I'll just watch it on the other TV."   OK, you go for it.  Let me know how that works out.

The poor dog suffered more than anyone though.  He came downstairs at one point dressed in a pink bathrobe and his head was covered in hair clips.  My daughter really shouldn’t be left alone with animals.  She killed a parrot when she was four.

After the storm was over my cat was very upset about all the branches in the yard and I think he wanted me to go out and pick them up right away.  He looked very stressed and spent an excessive amount of time seeking affection.  I think he needed a kitty Xanax, so I administered a healthy dose of catnip and he was off in another world for most of the afternoon.

By 8:30 pm the kids were tucked into the pull-out bed and my wife was right next to them on the couch.  I headed upstairs and crashed by 9:00.  The rain had stopped, the air was dry and the wind was still blowing at about 20 or 30 mph.  I opened all the windows and it felt like October.  I loved it!  I had the best nights sleep I've had in a very long time.

This morning I had the option to go to work or use a vacation day and stay home.  I believe another day in that house with my wife and kids would have put me in the nut house.  So here I sit eating microwave popcorn and surrounded by the glow of electricity.  Unfortunately I have to leave in a couple hours and return to my primitive shack full of restless natives.  Maybe I'll bring home a wild animal and we'll cook it over a fire in the back yard.

Busy, busy, busy!

I'm still spending most of my free time crafting speeches for my Speechcrafters Class.  This Thursday I have to do a three-bullet informative speech about anything I want. I have the floor for three minutes.  I'm going to talk about the infamous "Prince of Nigeria" e-mail scam.  I was delving into the history and immediately found two interesting things. 1) Nigeria is a constitutional democracy and has no monarchy whatsoever.  Odd, since there are about 28 Nigerian princes on LinkedIn right now.  2) This scam used to be a fax machine scam in the '80s and before that it was a letter writing scam and can be traced back to the 1920s!  Who knew?

The bug bites are just about gone. Yaaaaaa!

I normally don't blog about my kids unless it's something interesting, cool or funny.  With that in mind, we took them to an outdoor survival class last weekend.  It was basically a half day class designed to teach them what to do if they get lost in the woods.

All the exercises were about keeping them warm, dry and increasing their chances of getting found.  Here's a picture of my daughter's final test.

She found a high spot (to prevent being flooded in the rain) under a tree (to keep her dry) and made a small bench out of dry leaves and branches to keep her off the cold ground (if it were winter time and not 90 degrees.)  She then blew on her whistle three times (universal sign of distress) every minute until the teacher got there.  GOOD JOB!

We went to a small nature museum, after a picnic lunch, and found this interesting thing:

Can you guess what it is?  I'll put the answer at the bottom of this post.

We stopped at this cool country store.  It was a 200 year old, 3 story barn.  This is what I imagine when I think of a New England country store.  They had home-made onion & peach salsa!

Later that night my wife found this HUGE frog in our garden.  He was there to eat the beetles and he had a reservation.  We let him stay the night.

On Sunday morning my daughter's pony, Scout came out of the closet...

Monday found me back at work and doing a series of environmental inspections through Keen and into Brattleboro, Vermont.

Downtown Brattleboro...

That brings us up to today, which has been filled with speech writing, grant contract amendment writing, customer service voice mails to answer and e-mail questions to reply to.  By this time tomorrow the week will be more than half over.

Oh, and for those who made it all the way to the end...that odd thing in my hand was a tooth from a sperm whale.

Weekend events

I know, I promised that I would post pics on Monday but...I lied.

So I took Friday off and went kayaking.  I chose a tidal river right on the seacoast and these two cute little ducklings (on the concrete ramp) came to give me a send off.

The river was moving at about 6 knots and I paddled against it for about 30 minutes.

Then I stopped and just floated up river with the current, steering the boat only when I needed to.  I went up river several miles and through two towns.  It was very relaxing.  At 11ish I pulled the boat out onto a small island and had lunch.  By 1 pm the tide was all the way in and I was able to paddle home with little effort at all. 

Later that night I invited as many friends as I could to come sit around the fire-pit to drink, eat and swap war stories.  I provided chips while others brought some baked goods.

It's a nice feeling when everybody drives to your house for the night.  It shows that they like spending time with you.  I have good friends.  One of my buddies from high school showed up who I've only seen about three times in the past 20 years. I loved catching up.  We wrapped it up at about 1:30 in the morning and I didn't get out of bed until 10 am the next day.  Totally worth it!

The next day I awoke to find that my ankles and calves had been dined upon my something.  These are the worse bug bites I've ever had.  There are so many it looks like a rash, but it isn't.  They are just 100s of tiny bug bites. I wore socks, shoes and bug spray too!  Itches like hell!  WTF!

That's all I have today.  I have to work on my speech for Speechcrafters.  Thursday is "Ice Breaker" day and I have to come up with a speech to describe myself to all the other people in the class.  I actually have an opening, body and a closing.   I'm doing a practice run in about 30 minutes with a mentor and then I have Wednesday to polish it up.

Wish me luck!

Anyone want to share their weekend experiences?

I'm back...and exhausted!

Well, it's been an interesting couple of weeks.  I spent the 6th through the 9th incredibly sick. I contracted some kind of an infection from a tick bite.  My temperature was between 100 and 102 all week and every muscle in my upper body felt like it had been beaten with an iron pipe.  Between the muscle aches and the night sweats I was only able to get about 2 or 3 hours of sleep per night.  The doctor pulled some blood cultures for West Nile Virus and Eastern Equine Encephalitis and thankfully both came back negative.  I never experienced a headache so the doc said that pretty much ruled out meningitis.  I was given a prescription for an antibiotic that helps fight off Lyme disease and by the morning of the 10th I was feeling fairly normal.  I was completely drained and weak though and had no energy whatsoever.  The 10th was also the day I was supposed to start my vacation, which was actually my rotation as a leader at my son's Scouting Camp.  It was also the morning of my 400 yard camp swim test. 

I had to swim 300 yards doing the breast stroke and then 100 yards doing the back stroke, then tread water for several minutes.  I'm not sure if I spent more energy swimming or trying to prevent my face from contorting into a frightening look of death, but I made it.  I couldn't walk straight for about five minutes after I climbed onto the dock, and I kept yawning (gasping) for air for about 4 hours after I left the swimming area.  My ears also popped (like when you're in high altitude) and I couldn't clear them until the next day. That's when the real fun began.

Our Pack-group consisted of 10 Cub Scouts including two sets of brothers and my son.  Over the next five days we would walk between 25 and 26 miles (according to the GPS) and deal with everything from lost toothbrushes to mild dehydration to sibling rivalry. The 6:15 a.m. wake-up calls were a little harsh in my opinion.  Rain storms are awesome when you're in a tent; not so awesome when it's 95 degrees out at midnight and the humidity is 100%.  My tent was like an oven half the nights I was there and falling asleep in a huge puddle of sweat seemed normal by Thursday.  But the kids had a blast and nobody was injured.  That last part isn't completely true.  One of the scouts cut his finger during a whittling class on day two.  On day three he fell down a paved hill and skinned his knee.  On day four he bit his own finger during lunch.  For a moment I thought maybe he was trying to escape piece by piece.

I arrived home on the 15th and immediately did a lot of smelly laundry.  The past two weeks had been physically and mentally draining, but the next day was going to be the biggest challenge and completely drain me emotionally.  I made a trip up north with my best friend's widow. We kayaked out onto his favorite lake and scattered some of his ashes not far from the rope swing he and I played on as children almost 30 years ago.  We toasted his memory with two bottles of Molson Canadian and shared some stories and memories of the man we both loved so dearly.  Then we drove east and ate a seafood dinner big enough to sink a humpback whale; no regrets.  My friend, Jim and his wife had been together since high school and they were still going strong.  You could see the love they had for each other when they would stare into each others eyes.  It was like the whole world would stop for them.  He was my best friend but he was also my technical adviser on all things electronic, my therapist, my career councilor and my closest link to so many childhood memories.  I hate not being able to call him. But he comes to me in my dreams once in a while and I'm thankful for that.  He passed away just three weeks after his 39th birthday.  I miss him so much.

After I returned home from the lake I fell asleep at 4 p.m. and didn't wake up until 10 am the next day.  I finally had caught up on my sleep.  It's a good thing too.  I had to go back to work the next morning.  I showed up to the office this Monday looking ten times more exhausted than when I had left.

I need a vacation!

Smitten Kill

This is "Smitten the Kitten."  

He is a most excellent hunter of rodents and foul beasts.  He shows up on my front steps with gifts every morning.  Last night he brought me something he's never brought home before...a huge dead rat!

Seeing how we do not have a Chinese restaurant within 20 miles of were we live, I'm more than a little curious about where this thing came from.  Anyone missing a dead rat?  Well, it might not have been dead when you lost it.