Noel

We survived.

I am at work. Luckily there is a shower here so I could get cleaned up. There is no power still at our house and might not be until tomorrow night. Jeff was supposed to go away this week but there is no power at his office so he needs to stay here.

That storm was nothing like I’ve ever experienced! Have you ever had to wait in the dark for sunrise? I started counting at 6 hours until sunrise. It was a long night! My fault though – I purposely slept in my clothes so I would have a lousy sleep so I could wake up and catch some of the storm. I woke up at 2:20am. The power was already off. I was awake in bed most of the night wishing I was sleeping through it. The whole house was shaking – including the bed and night stand beside my head. There were gusts that sounded like the roof was one nail away from going.

Around 4am I went downstairs and was shining the flashlight out the doors to see if we still had our deck and trees and vehicles. I grabbed the battery radio and took it upstairs. Our local radio station here is an absolute piece of garbage. Even today, they were still not saying where there was power, where there wasn’t. They didn’t have any updates of any kind. Their lead news story yesterday evening at 5pm was about Pakistan. And it was a local guy sitting here in town reading it.

CBC out of Halifax was the most amazing source. They had reporters out all over the Maritimes all weekend. Until noon on Sunday they just let people call in from where ever and report what they were experiencing.

I sat perched at our bedroom window for the next couple of hours. Once it got a bit lighter outside, but still long before sun up, I could start to make out the enormous whitecaps on our inland lake across the road.

After sun up I took the dogs out. It was mild out – about 14 – because the air was tropical coming up from the south. I took some photos and videos I’ll put up when we get power back at home.

We drove around yesterday and there are trees down EVERYWHERE. Some are ripped right out of the ground, and others are snapped right in half. I saw houses and sheds missing big patches of shingles. There is a cottage across the lake with TWO large trees on it. Lots of garbage boxes at the ends of people’s laneways had their wooden lids ripped right off the hinges. Some driveways were washed out again.

We thought we were ready, but by last night when we were sitting there in the dark thinking about it, it would have been nice to have some battery lights or lanterns. We have no fuel for the campstoves because we dumped them out to move. Jeff cooked on the bbq a couple times yesterday. We lit the house with candles last night and went to sleep early. The phone still has service. Even if we had been smart enough to put the solar yard lights outside yesterday we could have had them inside last night but we cleaned the yard up and put everything away on Saturday before the storm.

This morning it was really frosty outside and I slipped on the deck and went way way up in the air and then came down down down crashed onto the deck on my ass and back. I have a very sore tailbone. My wrist is sore too. Guess I’ll remember next time how slippery the frost is on the deck.

K, back to work, more updates later.