You don't know what you have until you lose it, right? Well, where we live the power went out for well over 60,000 households for about a week due to an ice storm. We lost our power for 5 days. Some people are still out after 8 days or more. We were fortunate enough to borrow a generator and wire a 220 volt line into our fuse box in the house, but many other people moved out of their homes for a week. The timing was bad, being the week of Christmas. Our Holiday party was relocated from our home to my parents down the road, who were, fortunately, not affected. Small inconveniences came up. Alarm clocks didn't work. Cell phones were hard to keep charged. No home telephone or internet made it difficult to communicate with friends and family. Some friends and neighbors burst pipes due to the cold weather.
We've lost power for a day or two in the past, but rarely during the winter and rarely more than a day or two. It was a bit of a wake up call for us to have more candles, coolers, flashlights (with batteries) and firewood in the future. A back up generator of our own would have made the early going easier.
It's times like these that pull people together. Our neighbors around us were very generous as well as family offering a warm place to stay and extension cords and gasoline. It will be a Christmas we won't forget for quite a while.
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