Thanks for the fish

So Thursday morning it started sleeting. I carpooled with J, taking my subaru all tricked out with snow tires. My office is about 40 miles south of where we live, and he’s about 17 minutes even further south. That means I had to drop him off, then turn around and come back north on icy roads. Then I had a dentist appointment (no cavities, not much plaque but receding gums as always (have I already written about this?) so I had to drive back down south, then back to work, then back to pick up J and then home. It has been snowing/sleeting/freezing rain all day so the traffic was horrendous and it took us forever to get home. My piano lesson was canceled and I planned to work from home on Friday.

Friday morning, I’m afraid it’s not bad enough to work from home and consider going into the office anyway. J is watching the tv and can’t really figure out how bad the roads are. Our local school district hasn’t cancelled school. With my previous boss, he was fine with us working from hom. My new boss seemed a little skeptical, but grudgingly agreed, but I felt guilty. Then, before I had a shower, the power went off. Fine by me, that just meant I could stay home guilt free, take a vacation day, and sleep. That got old fast. No power, no heat, no water, no INTERNET, no phone (cuz it goes through the internet/cable), no shower, no taking a doo doo when I needed to. Well, ok, I got one flush and it was wasted on the smallest turd in history. Even my cell phone doesn’t really work from our house in the woods.

Around 1, I’m freaking out about all the food in our freezer. We’ve been on a sale spending spree. Every time anything is on sale I buy it. So we have about $200 worth of pork chops, chicken breasts, cheddar brats (yum), not to mention our harvest of corn, blueberries, etc. from the garden. We decide to drive all the way to Augusta to go to the gym. We have “black card” membership to Planet Fitness so we can go to any of their locations. The Brunswick one had power going on and off (we called from the mother in law’s house). Augusta had lost power but it was back on. So we drive up there, work out, have showers, come home and the power is on. Thank the lordess. We’re not even big consumers of electricity, but let’s face it, modern life was built around it. You can’t do shit (literally) without it. We have a well that is hooked to an electric water pump. Our furnace is electric. We have a propane fireplace but the fan is electric. For all my “I’m a pioneer!” boasting, we were woefully unprepared. No food that didn’t require cooking, no water, no way to heat the home. We were fucked.

Anyway, the power came back on but we were without cable and thus internet and phone until about an hour ago. I did a lot of reading. I finished my Anderson Cooper book and then read “Nickel and Dimed”. I guess I’m on a nonfiction kick. Most of all, I missed blogging. My sister and I have a reading blog and I haven’t been able to check it or update it, and that’s been killing me.

What else? Had our office Xmas party last night. It was a little boring, and I got a little jealous, but mostly I looked pretty fabulous, drank a lot of beer, but did not get embarrassingly drunk, J won a gift basket (I never win anything) and I talked to my new boss a little. Fairly uneventful. Not sure I’ll bother next year. Tried to get J on the dance floor. The only dance I remember from our lessons in the mambo, but he wouldn’t go for it. Oh well.

I’m not even dreading work tomorrow because I’m sick of sitting in the house doing nothing. It’s nice to be connected to the world again.