My perfectly effed up Friday

** I appolgize in advance for any expletives that this entry might contain ***

My effed up Friday started Thursday night when I got home from work. I walk in the door and see William asleep on the couch. Now usually he doesn't sleep in the afternoon unless he is sick, and even then he hasn't slept in the afternoon in quite a long time. Usually a little side effect of his napping is that he is a bear to go to bed at night. The good news is that he doesn't have a cold, the bad news is that he was a bear to go to bed. Jen had to work Friday morning so the alarm has to go off at 5:30am. I would like to go to bed since it is going to be an early morning, but William keeps coming out of his room because he isn't tired. He went from just walking out on the landing to going into his brother's room and jumping on him (which Andrew doesn't budge, man, he's a heavy sleeper). Finally after midnight I just take him into our bedroom and set up a pillow and blanket on the floor for him to crash. I am not sure how much longer he was awake, but I only made it a few minutes before I was sawing logs. The 5:30 alarm came wayyyyy too early, so Jen got up and started getting ready with William sleeping on the floor. She informs me that school is cancelled for the day so that will make is easier on the babysitters not having to cart all the kids around to drop off and pick up William. Around 6:15 Andrew comes walking in the room and I try to get him to sleep next to me for just a little longer, but he is persistent that he wants and needs his "cereal and milk" ASAFP. He is real persistent about needing it as soon as he wakes up. The child has not patience (what kid does). As I am following him down the hall to get him "HIS PRECIOUS..." the power goes out in the house. Crap. So I take Andrew downstairs and get out the flashlights that I have stashed away for just such emergencies. I have come to find out that if a cricket farts it will knock out power to our grid so I have started putting together these kits so I know where they are. If the kids get ahold of them they become playthings so I can never find them and usually they have dead batteries. It really sucks being on the edge of the grid, I know that we are because I can look across the street and see their freakin' Christmas lights. I know it's not their fault they have power and we have a crappy grid, but it still pisses me off. The last time our grid went down for whatever reason it was gone for an hour or so, but in looking outside and seeing all of the trees bent over with ice I had a feeling that it would be alot longer. So I help Jen get out of the garage so she can leave for work and I run upstairs to get ready myself. We called Jen's mom (we knew she would be up at 6:30am) and arranged that I would drop the kids off to her house on the way to work. So I am trying to get myself and the 3 boys ready to go in the dark as well as bottles and food, and etc. It's so funny how I would still turn on light switches while going through the house, just a force of habit I think. Now usually if I leave at 7:30 I can make it to work on time, but trying to get everything packed up wasn't going to let that happen so I knew I was going to be a little late. Before I leave I go down to the basement to check out the sump pump since I can hear the back-up running. The back up pump is doing it's jog pretty well, but it seems to be running quite alot. This is where I notice that the check valve on the pump is not working correctly again and its allowing the water in the pipe to back up into the sump so its working twice as often as it should. I forget how long the battery is good for on this system, but I am thinking that it is 12 hours. So I load the kids up and head out on some real nasty roads. The mains aren't too bad, but the secondaries are dangerous. Of course the in-laws live 3 miles down on a hilly county road so that was real interesting. As I pull up to the in-laws house I hit the garage door opener and ... nothing. Finally I go up to the front door where my mother in law greets me and says that they just lost power. She tried to call me (oh by the way did I mention that my cell phone was dead) and let me know. So after debating what to do I decide to take the kids to my mom's house since the in-laws are on a well so they don't have any running water and my mom still has power. So I load the kids up for ride to my mom's house. She lives down the street from me so I had to backtrack almost all the way back to my house dodging trees hanging in the streets and broken limbs. Finally I head up to work and notice that the further North that I go the less ice there is on the trees. I get to work an hour and a half late,but ended up having a pretty good day there. How sad is it that the best part of my day was working. I kept calling the house hoping that the answering machine would pick up, thus letting me know that we had power again but no luck. After getting off work I headed home to check on things like the sump pump and the cat. Surprisingly it wasn't that cold in the house, I think around 60 degrees. I did notice the sump back up was still going off pretty often so I decided to try and drain the sump out to see if I could conserve a little of the battery life since it had been 12 hours of it running. Before getting the battery back up for the sump pump, the plan for getting power to the sump in an emergency was to plug into a DC converter that we bought for the car and run the pump. This was my ultimate back up plan before the battery. Of course I had never tested it and just assumed it would work. So I hook everything up and.. nothing. I couldn't even plug it an extension cord into the converter without it freaking out. Thank God I didn't have to use it before the battery or I would have been totally fubared. So I am trying to think of what to do next. I know there probably isn't a generator to buy or rent on this end of town and I am not sure I want to try getting another converter. I ended up heading over to mom's to have a little dinner and make a plan of attack with Jen. I have a little dinner and just sit there dazed, trying to think of what to do next. The boys and Jen are going to spend the night at grandma's and I decide to spend the night at our house to keep an eye on the sump and run the gas fireplace to get a little heat in the house so it doesn't get too cold for the cat or the pipes. After eating I am getting ready to head back to the house and the boys are in with grandma in her bedroom watching Christmas shows. All of a sudden I hear Andrew scream. Now I know Andrew's screams and this is the serious one. I take off to the bedroom and see mom running Andrew into the bathroom with blood running down his face. Supposedly mom's dog Willie was asleep on the bed and Andrew startled him, so Willie bit him on the face. We are working on cleaning him up and he calms down a little bit. The one gash on his lip looks pretty deep so I decide to take him to the ER just in case. So we load up Andrew and take off for the hospital. Of course we have to head home first since that's where our new medial insurance cards are. As Jenny is inside grabbing the cards I tell her to grab her frozen breast milk so we can store it in mom's freezer, just in case, but we were too late and all of her milk (or "white gold" as I call it) was already defrosted, but good news the sump was still running. So we take Andrew to the ER and got in pretty fast since no one in their right mind would be out in crappy weather like this. The doctor didn't see a need for stitches since it wasn't deep enough, so they just cleaned him up and put some medicine on the cuts. Thinking about it later, I think the doctor was a guy I went to grade school with, but I didn't make the connection since I had alot of other crap to worry about. This is the third time that Willie has bit one of the boys. So we get back to my mom's house and get the boys situated with their sleeping bags and pillows. I head back to our house and try to settle in and get some sleep. I took everything out of the fridge and put it outside to keep it cold. I should have done it earlier,but I just wasn't thinking straight. Everything in the freezers still looked pretty frozen. I start a fire in the fireplace, but it hasn't been on in years so the whole house gets filled with a burning smell for a while. The smoke detectors are beeping every couple of minutes to let me know the power is out and they are running on batteries since they are tied into the house electric. And the sump is running like crazy. So with the fire going, I crank up a radio (I actually had to crank it to get it to work) and listen to Christmas music. My old reliable Mag flashlight goes out with a burnt bulb (of course). I ended up going downstairs and manually emptying the sump pump with a bucket, thinking that it would be good for a while. I am settled in front of the fire with a beer thinking if I can just ignore the beeps of the smoke detectors that I can catch some sleep. Nope. The sump alarm goes off again, so back down to empty the sump. I am heading back down every 10 minutes and bringing up 3 buckets of water at at time. One of the times down there I notice one of the system lights is indicating that the battery is nearing a full discharge. The only way I can think of recharging this battery is to run it upstairs and jump it with the car. So I am past exhaustion, smoke detectors beeping, winding up the radio every few minutes, going downstairs every 10 minutes to empty the sump, I am preparing myself for a looooonnnggggggg freakin' night. It's a little after midnight when I am heading upstairs from the basement with another bucket of water when I hear some humming. But it wasn't the hum from the sump pumps, it sounded like the hum of the furnace, but there wasn't any lights on in the house. Then I remembered that I had turned them all off in the morning. I hit the switch in the kitchen and Thank God there is power. Rather than go back to mom's I decided to spend the night in the house in case the power went out again so I crashed on the couch. At 5:30am the garage door opens as Jen stopped by the house before going to work to brush her teeth (I forgot to pack that). I threw the food back into the fridge (saved most of it) and headed back to mom's. I ended up crashing on her couch until Andew woke up promptly at 6:50am and we were up for the day. As quickly as possible I packed up the kids to take them home. I figured that it would be easier to watch them at our house and I could possibly take a few cat naps while they played around me. I ended up having enough energy in the afternoon to make Christmas cookies. Jen got home and took a little nap in the afternoon as well. Later that night the in-laws came over to watch the boys while we went to MR's Christmas party. They still didn't have power so with babysitting the boys it was also an opportunity to take a shower, do some laundry and grab some water for flushing toilets. We had alot of fun at MR's party. It's so nice being around adults and not having to worry about what the boys are getting into. We ended up staying until after midnight which is alot later than I thought we would last.

All of the trees still have a ton of ice on them so there is a chance that we could loose power again, especially with it being a windy day outside. Currently it's 4 degrees outside and they don't call for temps to be anywhere near 30 degrees until the middle of the week, so we have all week to wonder if we will loose power again. My flashlights are ready .....